Extract certain text lines from webpage with python

Question

I'm trying to extract the first ISS TLE (Two Line Element set) from this website.

I need the first three lines following the:

 TWO LINE MEAN ELEMENT SET

text: (ISS line, 1 line, 2 line).

So I get the text that has what I want using beautiful soup, but then I don't really know how to extract those lines of text. I can't use split() because I need to exactly maintain the white space in those three lines. How can this be done?

import urllib2
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import ephem
import datetime

nasaissurl = 'http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/realdata/sightings/SSapplications/Post/JavaSSOP/orbit/ISS/SVPOST.html'
soup = BeautifulSoup(urllib2.urlopen(nasaissurl), 'html.parser')
body = soup.find_all("pre")
index = 0
firstTLE = False
for tag in body:
    if "ISS" in tag.text:
        print tag.text

Stephen Rauch · Accepted Answer · 2018-02-24 00:58:36Z

If you break the text into lines and process each line at a time, then you can rejoin the lines when you find the three lines you need like:

Code:

def process_tag_text(tag_text):
    marker = 'TWO LINE MEAN ELEMENT SET'
    text = iter(tag_text.split('\n'))
    for line in text:
        if marker in line:
            next(text)
            results.append('\n'.join(
                (next(text), next(text), next(text))))
    return results

Test Code:

import urllib2
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

nasaissurl = 'http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/realdata/sightings/' \
             'SSapplications/Post/JavaSSOP/orbit/ISS/SVPOST.html'
soup = BeautifulSoup(urllib2.urlopen(nasaissurl), 'html.parser')
body = soup.find_all("pre")
results = []
for tag in body:
    if "ISS" in tag.text:
        results.extend(process_tag_text(tag.text))

print('\n'.join(results))

Results:

ISS
1 25544U 98067A   18054.51611082  .00016717  00000-0  10270-3 0  9009
2 25544  51.6368 225.3935 0003190 125.8429 234.3021 15.54140528 20837
ISS
1 25544U 98067A   18055.54493747  .00016717  00000-0  10270-3 0  9010
2 25544  51.6354 220.2641 0003197 130.5210 229.6221 15.54104949 20991
ISS
1 25544U 98067A   18056.50945749  .00016717  00000-0  10270-3 0  9022
2 25544  51.6372 215.4558 0003149 134.4837 225.6573 15.54146916 21143
ISS
1 25544U 98067A   18057.34537198  .00016717  00000-0  10270-3 0  9031
2 25544  51.6399 211.2932 0002593 130.2258 229.9121 15.54133048 21277

SIM · Accepted Answer · 2018-02-24 21:28:01Z

You can achieve the same in several ways. Here is another approach:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests

URL = "https://spaceflight.nasa.gov/realdata/sightings/SSapplications/Post/JavaSSOP/orbit/ISS/SVPOST.html"
soup = BeautifulSoup(requests.get(URL).text,"lxml")

for item in soup.select("pre"):
    for line in range(len(item.text.splitlines())):
        if "25544U" in item.text.splitlines()[line]:
            doc = item.text.splitlines()[line-1].strip()
            doc1 = item.text.splitlines()[line].strip()
            doc2 = item.text.splitlines()[line+1].strip()
            print("{}\n{}\n{}\n".format(doc,doc1,doc2))

Partial output:

ISS
1 25544U 98067A   18054.51611082  .00016717  00000-0  10270-3 0  9009
2 25544  51.6368 225.3935 0003190 125.8429 234.3021 15.54140528 20837

ISS
1 25544U 98067A   18055.54493747  .00016717  00000-0  10270-3 0  9010
2 25544  51.6354 220.2641 0003197 130.5210 229.6221 15.54104949 20991

ISS
1 25544U 98067A   18056.50945749  .00016717  00000-0  10270-3 0  9022
2 25544  51.6372 215.4558 0003149 134.4837 225.6573 15.54146916 21143

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