BeautifulSoup .find() only works on certain links

January 2, 2024

I have made a very simple web scraper which iterates through a list of links and scrapes the text and dates from them and outputs this into a text file.

So far everything has been working fine but I have received an error which only occurs for certain links.

for reference, I am using the same website (Yahoo Finance) which contains the same html for each webpage.

Below is an example of the issue I am running into. The function successfully retrieves the date from the first link, but fails on the second one:

Below is the entire code for the web scraper:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import datetime
import yfinance as yf

def unique_filename () :

    current_date = datetime.datetime.now()
    day_month_string = current_date.strftime("%S-%M-%H-%d")
    filename = day_month_string
    filename+="-ScrapedData.txt"
    
    return filename

def get_currency_info (name) :

    currency = yf.Ticker(name)
    history = currency.history(period="1mo")

    return history



def scrape_all (list, curr) :

    filename = unique_filename()

    with open(filename, 'a') as file:
        file.write(get_currency_info(curr).to_string())
        file.write("\n\n\n\n")
    
    for link in list :
        print("=======================NEW LINK========================")
        source = requests.get(link).text

        soup = BeautifulSoup(source, 'lxml')
        
        date = soup.find(class_='caas-attr-time-style').find('time')
        
        with open(filename, 'a') as file :
            dateToAppend = (date.get_text().split('at'))[0]
            print(dateToAppend)
            file.write(f"Date: {dateToAppend}")
            file.write("\n\n\n\n")

        texts = soup.find_all('p')
        for text in texts:
            #print(text.get_text())
            with open(filename, 'a') as file:
                text_to_append = text.get_text()
                file.write(text_to_append)
                file.write("\n")


if __name__ == "__main__" :

    listOfLinks = [

        'https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/bitcoin-byd-bp-marks-spencer-trending-tickers-112621324.html',
        'https://uk.yahoo.com/finance/news/bitcoin-rally-fuelled-by-shrinking-supply-102808887.html'
    ]

    scrape_all(listOfLinks, "BTC")

    print("=======================LIST END========================")```

>Solution :

EDIT

Based on your comment, the page loads in your browser but not through requests.

You can add the user-agent header to requests.get() to trick the page that you’re not a robot:

HEADERS = {'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36' }
...
source = requests.get(link, headers=HEADERS).text
...

See also:

Instagram blocks me for the requests with 429

Original Answer

I think the error is clear:

`NoneType` object has no attribute 'find'

which means, that in your code:

date = soup.find(class_='caas-attr-time-style').find('time')

the soup.find(class_='caas-attr-time-style') is returning None.

To investigate the problem, I’ve caught the exception and printed out the soup to see what’s going on:

soup = BeautifulSoup(source, 'lxml')
...
try:
    date = soup.find(class_='caas-attr-time-style').find('time')
except AttributeError:
    print("Attribute Error\n", soup.prettify())

Which clearly Prints:

<body>
  <!-- status code : 404 -->
  <!-- Not Found on Server -->
  <table>
   <tbody>
    <tr>
     <td>
      <img alt="Yahoo Logo" src="https://s.yimg.com/rz/p/yahoo_frontpage_en-US_s_f_p_205x58_frontpage.png"/>
      <h1 style="margin-top:20px;">
       Will be right back...
      </h1>
      <p id="message-1">
       Thank you for your patience.
      </p>
      <p id="message-2">
       Our engineers are working quickly to resolve the issue.
      </p>
     </td>
    </tr>
   </tbody>
  </table>
 </body>
</html>

So, from the above HTML it seems like the page is currently down.

What you can do to solve the problem is to use a Try/Except block and skip over it the value doens’t exist:

  for link in list:
        print("=======================NEW LINK========================")
        source = requests.get(link).text
        soup = BeautifulSoup(source, 'lxml')
        try:
            date = soup.find(class_='caas-attr-time-style').find('time')
        except AttributeError:
            date = 'No date found'
        
        with open(filename, 'a') as file:
            dateToAppend = (date.get_text().split('at'))[0]
            print(dateToAppend)
            file.write(f"Date: {dateToAppend}")
            file.write("\n\n\n\n")