web scraper python
def get_names():
"""
Downloads the page where the list of mathematicians is found
and returns a list of strings, one per mathematician
"""
url = 'http://www.fabpedigree.com/james/mathmen.htm'
response = simple_get(url)
if response is not None:
html = BeautifulSoup(response, 'html.parser')
names = set()
for li in html.select('li'):
for name in li.text.split('n'):
if len(name) > 0:
names.add(name.strip())
return list(names)
# Raise an exception if we failed to get any data from the url
raise Exception('Error retrieving contents at {}'.format(url))