How to Extract Data from HTML Tables using Python BeautifulSoup: A Comprehensive Guide to Parsing Parking Tickets?

Python BeautifulSoup Parsing Table: Comprehensive Guide

When extracting data from HTML tables using Python's BeautifulSoup, understanding how to parse the specific table layout is crucial. In this scenario, the challenge lies in parsing the "lineItemsTable" from a parking ticket website.

To extract the tickets, follow these steps:

<code class="python"># Retrieve the table element
table = soup.find("table", {"class": "lineItemsTable"})

# Initialize an empty list to store the tickets
data = []

# Iterate over each row in the table
for row in table.findAll("tr"):

    # Extract each cell in the row
    cells = row.findAll("td")

    # Clean the cell data and store it in a list
    cells = [cell.text.strip() for cell in cells]

    # If the row contains valid data, append it to the list
    if cells:
        data.append([cell for cell in cells if cell])</code>

This approach results in a list of lists, where each inner list represents the data from a single ticket row, excluding empty values. Here's an example output:

[[u'1359711259', u'SRF', u'08/05/2013', u'5310 4 AVE', u'K', u'19', u'125.00', u'$'],
[u'7086775850', u'PAS', u'12/14/2013', u'3908 6th Ave', u'K', u'40', u'125.00', u'$'],
[u'7355010165', u'OMT', u'12/14/2013', u'3908 6th Ave', u'K', u'40', u'145.00', u'$'],
[...]]

Additional Notes:

• The last row may include metadata about payment amount. If the number of columns in a row is less than 7, it should be discarded.
• The final column in each row contains an input text box that needs to be handled separately.

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