Clicking link using beautifulsoup in python

beautifulsoup, python, web-scraping

Solution

`BeautifulSoup` is an HTML parser.

Further discussion really depends on the concrete situation you are in and the complexity of the particular web page.

If you need to interact with a web-page: submit forms, click buttons, scroll etc - you need to use a tool that utilizes a real browser, like `selenium`.

In certain situations, for example, if there is no javascript involved in submitting a form, `mechanize` would also work for you.

And, sometimes you can handle it by simply following the link with `urllib2` or `requests`.

Problem

In mechanize we click links either by using follow_link or click_link. Is there a similar kind of thing in beautiful soup to click a link on a web page?

Original source