This is just one specific practical example of what you can do with Beautiful Soup.
Python formatter online code#
Run this code from a directory where you want to save all of the MIDI files, and watch your terminal screen display all 2230 MIDIs that you downloaded (at the time of writing this). In this download_track function, we're passing the Beautiful Soup object representing the HTML element of the link to the MIDI file, along with a unique number to use in the filename to avoid possible naming collisions. Let's use the find_all method to go through all of the links on the page, but use regular expressions to filter through them so we are only getting links that contain MIDI files whose text has no parentheses, which will allow us to exclude all of the duplicates and remixes.Ĭreate a file called nes_midi_scraper.py and add the following code to it: If you right-click on the element you're interested in, you can inspect the HTML behind that element to figure out how you can programmatically access the data you want. When you're writing code to parse through a web page, it's usually helpful to use the developer tools available to you in most modern browsers. We only want one of each song, and because we ultimately want to use this data to train a neural network to generate accurate Nintendo music, we won't want to train it on user-created remixes.
Python formatter online download#
Our goal is to download a bunch of MIDI files, but there are a lot of duplicate tracks on this webpage as well as remixes of songs. Every web page is different, and sometimes getting the right data out of them requires a bit of creativity, pattern recognition, and experimentation. Parsing and navigating HTML with BeautifulSoupīefore writing more code to parse the content that we want, let’s first take a look at the HTML that’s rendered by the browser. You can find lots of cool features in the documentation.
You can also provide different arguments to find_all, such as regular expressions or tag attributes to filter your search as specifically as you want. With your virtual environment activated, run the following command in your terminal:
Python formatter online install#
You'll need to install the Requests library for making HTTP requests to get data from the web page, and Beautiful Soup for parsing through the HTML. Make sure you create and activate a virtual environment before installing any dependencies. Getting started and setting up dependenciesīefore moving on, you will need to make sure you have an up to date version of Python 3 and pip installed. Using Beautiful Soup we can get this data from the Video Game Music Archive. In order to do this, we'll need a set of MIDI music from old Nintendo games. Let's use the example of scraping MIDI data from the internet to train a neural network with Magenta that can generate classic Nintendo-sounding music. With Python tools like Beautiful Soup, you can scrape and parse this data directly from web pages to use for your projects and applications. But this data is often difficult to access programmatically if it doesn't come in the form of a dedicated REST API. The internet has an amazingly wide variety of information for human consumption.