Project: Question about _index_document fuction

[Jeong]

I am modifying the _visit_a function in crawler, and the hint says that I have to add title/alt/text to index for dest_url. So I looked at the _index_document function and was confused how to pass values to the function since the function takes 'soup' as an argument. Also, I do not get 100% what the index_document function is supposed to do. Any advice, please?

[Wesley May]

"soup" is a BeautifulSoup object (defined at line 316)

_index_document goes through the document, recursively visiting each tag. The relevant "_enter" function is called for each tag (note that _enter is a dictionary that maps tag names to *functions*). I don't think you need to modify this function in any way.

The _visit_a function is called whenever the crawler runs across an <a> tag, which is almost invariably a link to another webpage.

I feel like I'm missing your exact question though. Tell me if that's the case.

[Jeong]

Sorry, bad question haha.. Well, the question I had was about calling the _index_document function. TODO says 'add title/alt/text to index for destination url' and I am assuming that the _index_document function has to be called. However, I do not know how to do it since the function takes 'soup' as an argument. Or am I on the totally wrong track here that I don't have to call the _index_document function? If so, I don't get what the line wants me to do. Sorry if I don't make sense this time either. lol

[Wesley May]

No, I don't think this has anything to do with the _index_document function. It just means, look at the "title" and "alt" attributes of the <a> tag and store them somewhere, and also get the text from that tag. See the code that's commented out in lines 196 to 199? That's how you grab the info.