mad-beach-status

README.md

mad-beach-status

Hacked-together attempt at a Python scraper of Madison, Wis. beach status using Beautiful Soup and Requests. It pulls similar data from the Madison and Dane County Public Health website.

This could be made better in a number of ways. Two that come to mind:

• Display lake that the beach is on
• if else for when beach is monitored by another agency and no status is available

beach-scrape.py

#import libraries
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
import re
import urllib
import urllib2

#set page user agent
user_agent = 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/1.0.154.53 Safari/525.19'
headers={'User-Agent':user_agent,}

#create a file to house the scraped data
f = open('beach-status.txt', 'w')

#make your header row
f.write("Beach" + "," + "Status" + "\n")

#varible for page content
html = urllib2.urlopen('http://www.publichealthmdc.com/environmental/water/beaches/').read()

#create soup object
soup = BeautifulSoup(html)

#find each beach
beach = {'class': 'outline_box_beaches'}
divs = soup.findAll(attrs = beach)

#loop through beaches, grabbing name and status
for el in divs:
    name = el.h2.text.strip()
    status = el.div.div.span.text.strip()
    print "%s - (%s)" % (name, status)

    #write to file:
    f.write(name + "," + status + "\n")

#close file
f.close()