Hyper(link) Active

One of the most important attributes to extract for "web-crawling" is the hyperlink url (href attribute) within an a tag. Here, you will extract such a hyperlink! We have created the function print_attribute to print out the data extracted from your XPath, so you can test your XPath strings in the console, if you like.

The exercise refers to the following HTML source code:

<html>
  <body>
    <div id="div1" class="class-1">
      <p class="class-1 class-2">Hello World!</p>
      <div id="div2">
        <p id="p2" class="class-2">Choose 
            <a href="http://datacamp.com">DataCamp!</a>!
        </p>
      </div>
    </div>
    <div id="div3" class="class-2">
      <p class="class-2">Thanks for Watching!</p>
    </div>
  </body>
</html>

This exercise is part of the course

Web Scraping in Python

View Course

Exercise instructions

Fill in the blanks to complete the variable xpath below to select the href attribute value from the DataCamp hyperlink.

Hands-on interactive exercise

Have a go at this exercise by completing this sample code.

# Create an xpath to the href attribute
xpath = '//p[@id=____]/a/____'

# Print out the selection(s); there should be only one
print_attribute( xpath )

Edit and Run Code