{{{#!python
import urllib2
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup

class Element:
    "A simple container of arbitrary named attributes."
    def __init__(self, **kw):
        self.__dict__.update(kw)
    def __repr__(self):
        return str(self.__dict__)

def FetchElements():
    """Chemical Elements

      Retrieves a list of the basic chemical elements, along with a few of
      their associated properties.
    """

    opener = urllib2.build_opener()
    opener.addheaders = [('User-agent', 'Mozilla/5.0')]

    page = opener.open("http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_elements_by_atomic_number")
    soup = BeautifulSoup(page)
    page.close()

    elements = {}
    for element in soup.html.body.table.findAll('tr')[1:]:
        fields = element.findAll('td')

        number = int(fields[0].renderContents())
        name = fields[1].a.renderContents()
        symbol = fields[2].renderContents()
        series = fields[4].a.renderContents()

        elements[number] = Element(
            number=number,
            name=name,
            symbol=symbol,
            series=series)

    return elements

elements = FetchElements()
print elements
}}}

'''Note(s):'''

  This example uses standard Python except for
  [[http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/|the BeautifulSoup package]] which must be installed separately.

----
CategoryPythonInEducation