Trying to grab just absolute links from a webpage using BeautifulSoup

Posted by Kevin on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Kevin
Published on 2010-03-23T17:22:53Z Indexed on 2010/03/23 18:23 UTC
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I am reading the contents of a webpage using BeautifulSoup. What I want is to just grab the <a href> that start with http://. I know in beautifulsoup you can search by the attributes. I guess I am just having a syntax issue. I would imagine it would go something like.

page = urllib2.urlopen("http://www.linkpages.com")
soup = BeautifulSoup(page)
for link in soup.findAll('a'):
    if link['href'].startswith('http://'):
        print links 

But that returns:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 2, in <module>
  File "C:\Python26\lib\BeautifulSoup.py", line 598, in __getitem__
    return self._getAttrMap()[key]
KeyError: 'href'

Any ideas? Thanks in advance.

EDIT This isn't for any site in particular. The script gets the url from the user. So internal link targets would be an issue, that's also why I only want the <'a'> from the pages. If I turn it towards www.reddit.com, it parses the beginning links and it gets to this:

<a href="http://www.reddit.com/top/">top</a>
<a href="http://www.reddit.com/saved/">saved</a>
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 2, in <module>
  File "C:\Python26\lib\BeautifulSoup.py", line 598, in __getitem__
    return self._getAttrMap()[key]
KeyError: 'href'

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