1 import urllib2
 2 from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
 3 
 4 class Element:
 5  "A simple container of arbitrary named attributes."
 6  def __init__(self, **kw):
 7  self.__dict__.update(kw)
 8  def __repr__(self):
 9  return str(self.__dict__)
 10 
 11 def FetchElements():
 12  """Chemical Elements
 13 
 14  Retrieves a list of the basic chemical elements, along with a few of
 15  their associated properties.
 16  """
 17 
 18  opener = urllib2.build_opener()
 19  opener.addheaders = [('User-agent', 'Mozilla/5.0')]
 20 
 21  page = opener.open("http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_elements_by_atomic_number")
 22  soup = BeautifulSoup(page)
 23  page.close()
 24 
 25  elements = {}
 26  for element in soup.html.body.table.findAll('tr')[1:]:
 27  fields = element.findAll('td')
 28 
 29  number = int(fields[0].renderContents())
 30  name = fields[1].a.renderContents()
 31  symbol = fields[2].renderContents()
 32  series = fields[4].a.renderContents()
 33 
 34  elements[number] = Element(
 35  number=number,
 36  name=name,
 37  symbol=symbol,
 38  series=series)
 39 
 40  return elements
 41 
 42 elements = FetchElements()
 43 print elements