python - scraping a response from a selected option in dropdown list

Question

This is an example of a page that lists baseball stats for a selected player, defaulting to the most recent year (2014, soon to be 2015) http://www.koreabaseball.com/Record/Player/HitterDetail/Game.aspx?playerId=76325

The drop down list allows the user to selected years back to 2010, but doesn't not change the displayed url. How can I scrape all the available years, from each value in the drop down list?

I'm currently using Python and BeautifulSoup, but I'm willing to use whatever will get the job done.

<select name="ctl00$ctl00$cphContainer$cphContents$ddlYear"     
        onchange="javascript:setTimeout(&#39;__doPostBack(&#39;ctl00$ctl00$cphContainer$cphContents$ddlYear&#39;,&#39;&#39;)&#39;, 0)" 
        id="cphContainer_cphContents_ddlYear" 
        class="select02 mgt30">
<option value="2014">2014</option>
<option value="2013">2013</option>
<option selected="selected" value="2012">2012</option>
<option value="2011">2011</option>
<option value="2010">2010</option>

Answer 1

Do it in two steps:

• make a GET request, parse HTML and extract the form input values
• make a POST request parsing input values alongside with ctl00$ctl00$cphContainer$cphContents$ddlYear parameter which is responsible for the year

Implementation example for year 2013 (using requests and BeautifulSoup):

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests

url = 'http://www.koreabaseball.com/Record/Player/HitterDetail/Game.aspx?playerId=76325'

with requests.Session() as session:
    session.headers = {'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_2) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/40.0.2214.115 Safari/537.36'}

    # parsing parameters
    response = session.get(url)
    soup = BeautifulSoup(response.content)

    data = {
        'ctl00$ctl00$cphContainer$cphContents$ddlYear': '2013',
        'ctl00$ctl00$txtSearchWord': '',
        '__EVENTTARGET': soup.find('input', {'name': '__EVENTTARGET'}).get('value', ''),
        '__EVENTARGUMENT': soup.find('input', {'name': '__EVENTARGUMENT'}).get('value', ''),
        '__LASTFOCUS': soup.find('input', {'name': '__LASTFOCUS'}).get('value', ''),
        '__VIEWSTATE': soup.find('input', {'name': '__VIEWSTATE'}).get('value', ''),
        '__VIEWSTATEGENERATOR': soup.find('input', {'name': '__VIEWSTATEGENERATOR'}).get('value', ''),
        '__EVENTVALIDATION': soup.find('input', {'name': '__EVENTVALIDATION'}).get('value', ''),
    }

    # parsing data
    response = session.post(url, data=data)

    soup = BeautifulSoup(response.content)

    for row in soup.select('table.tData01 tr'):
        print [td.text for td in row.find_all('td')]

This prints the contents of all stats tables for 2013:

[u'KIA', u'16', u'0.364', u'55', u'8', u'20', u'3', u'0', u'3', u'11', u'5', u'0', u'14', u'0', u'14', u'1']
[u'LG', u'15', u'0.321', u'53', u'7', u'17', u'1', u'0', u'2', u'9', u'1', u'1', u'6', u'3', u'10', u'2']
[u'NC', u'16', u'0.237', u'59', u'5', u'14', u'2', u'0', u'2', u'10', u'2', u'0', u'3', u'0', u'17', u'2']
[u'SK', u'16', u'0.235', u'51', u'7', u'12', u'1', u'0', u'3', u'13', u'1', u'3', u'13', u'1', u'12', u'4']
[u'ub450uc0b0', u'16', u'0.368', u'57', u'16', u'21', u'2', u'1', u'4', u'21', u'2', u'1', u'12', u'0', u'13', u'2']
[u'ub86fub370', u'16', u'0.375', u'56', u'9', u'21', u'4', u'0', u'3', u'13', u'4', u'3', u'11', u'0', u'9', u'3']
[u'uc0bcuc131', u'16', u'0.226', u'62', u'8', u'14', u'5', u'0', u'3', u'10', u'0', u'0', u'8', u'1', u'15', u'1']
[u'ud55cud654', u'15', u'0.211', u'57', u'7', u'12', u'3', u'0', u'2', u'9', u'0', u'0', u'1', u'1', u'19', u'3']
...