Parse Schedule

parseSchedule.py

print("Parse start")

sourcefile = "C:\\Users\\TOM\\PycharmProjects\\downloadNHL\\datafiles\\schedulebyseason.htm"
targetfile = "C:\\Users\\TOM\\PycharmProjects\\downloadNHL\\datafiles\\parsed_schedulebyseason.txt"

searchstr = "recap?id="

sample_recstr = "2015020001"
reclen = len(sample_recstr)

i = 0

with open(sourcefile,'r') as infile, open(targetfile,'w') as outfile:
    for line in infile:
        line_iterator = str(line).split(searchstr)
        if len(line_iterator) > 1:
            game_id = line_iterator[1][0:reclen]
            outfile.write(game_id)
            outfile.write("\n")
            i = i + 1

print(str(i) + " : records written")
print("Parse end")

Terrific stuff guys, thanks. This will definitely be especially valuable in my next parsing of a file.
Here's an alternative also provided:
https://gist.github.com/Ja1meMartin/db1b71ed90921aff24fa

Here's how to do it in Beautiful Soup:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import urllib2
import re

resp = urllib2.urlopen("http://www.nhl.com/ice/schedulebyseason.htm")
soup = BeautifulSoup(resp, "html.parser", from_encoding=resp.info().getparam('charset') )

with open('game-ids.txt', 'w') as output:
    for link in soup.find_all('a', href=True):
        #print link['href']
        # http://www.nhl.com/gamecenter/en/recap?id=2015020664
        result = re.search(r'recap\?id=(\d+)', link['href'])
        if result:
            output.write('%s\n' % result.group(1))

I'm fascinated. Thanks guys, I'm going to try these solutions as well.

Someone pointed to here:
https://gist.github.com/Ja1meMartin/db1b71ed90921aff24fa
And I made my updates accordingly.