Scrape table with no ids or classes using only standard libraries? - html

Question

I want to scrape two pieces of data from a website:
https://www.moneymetals.com/precious-metals-charts/gold-price
Specifically I want the "Gold Price per Ounce" and the "Spot Change" percent two columns to the right of it.
Using only Python standard libraries, is this possible? A lot of tutorials use the HTML element id to scrape effectively but inspecting the source for this page, it's just a table. Specifically I want the second and fourth <td> which appear on the page.

Answer 1

It's possible to do it with standard python libraries; ugly, but possible:
import urllib
from html.parser import HTMLParser
URL = 'https://www.moneymetals.com/precious-metals-charts/gold-price'
page = urllib.request.Request(URL)
result = urllib.request.urlopen(page)
resulttext = result.read()
class MyHTMLParser(HTMLParser):
gold = []
def handle_data(self, data):
self.gold.append(data)
parser = MyHTMLParser()
parser.feed(str(resulttext))
for i in parser.gold:
if 'Gold Price per Ounce' in i:
target= parser.gold.index(i) #get the index location of the heading
print(parser.gold[target+2]) #your target items are 2, 5 and 9 positions down in the list
print(parser.gold[target+5].replace('\\n',''))
print(parser.gold[target+9].replace('\\n',''))
Output (as of the time the url was loaded):
$1,566.70
8.65
0.55%