Extract contents from HTML

[chisox721]

Use a parser eg BeautifulSoup/lxml, Web-Scraping part-1
Example:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

html = '''\
<umpires>
  <umpire first="Mark" id="427533" last="Wegner" name="Mark Wegner" position="home"></umpire>
  <umpire first="Paul" id="427361" last="Nauert" name="Paul Nauert" position="first"></umpire>
  <umpire first="Gerry" id="427103" last="Davis" name="Gerry Davis" position="second"></umpire>
  <umpire first="Laz" id="427113" last="Diaz" name="Laz Diaz" position="third"></umpire>
  <umpire first="Bill" id="427344" last="Miller" name="Bill Miller" position="left"></umpire>
  <umpire first="Dan" id="427248" last="Iassogna" name="Dan Iassogna" position="right"></umpire>
</umpires>'''

soup = BeautifulSoup(html, 'lxml')

Use:

>>> soup.find('umpire')
<umpire first="Mark" id="427533" last="Wegner" name="Mark Wegner" position="home"></umpire>

>>> soup.find('umpire', position="second")
<umpire first="Gerry" id="427103" last="Davis" name="Gerry Davis" position="second"></umpire>
>>> soup.find('umpire', position="second").get('id')
'427103'

>>> [i.get('position') for i in soup.find_all('umpire')]
['home', 'first', 'second', 'third', 'left', 'right']
>>> [i.get('id') for i in soup.find_all('umpire')]
['427533', '427361', '427103', '427113', '427344', '427248']

>>> # Last a little more advance name and position in a dictionary
>>> dict(zip([i.get('name') for i in soup.find_all('umpire')], [i.get('position') for i in soup.find_all('umpire')]))
{'Bill Miller': 'left',
 'Dan Iassogna': 'right',
 'Gerry Davis': 'second',
 'Laz Diaz': 'third',
 'Mark Wegner': 'home',
 'Paul Nauert': 'first'}

Works great, thank you! I had tried using soup on my own but now realize I was approaching it completely wrong.