How can I improve this piece of code (scraping with Python)? - python-2.7

Question

I'm quite new to programming so I appologise if my question is too trivial.
I've recently taken some Udacity courses like "Intro to Computer Science", "Programming foundations with Python" and some others.
The other day my boss asked me to collect some email addresses from certain websites. Some of them had many addresses at the same page so, the bell rang and I was thinking of creating my own code to do the repetitive task of collecting the emails and pasting them in a spreadsheet.
So, after reviewing some of the lessons of those corses plus some videos on youtube I came up with this code.
Notes: It's written in Python 2.7.12 and I'm using Ubuntu 16.04.
import xlwt
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import urllib2
def emails_page2excel(url):
# Create html file from a given url
sauce = urllib2.urlopen(url).read()
soup = BeautifulSoup(sauce,'lxml')
# Create the spreadsheet book and a page in it
wb = xlwt.Workbook()
sheet1 = wb.add_sheet('Contacts')
# Find the emails and write them in the spreadsheet table
count = 0
for url in soup.find_all('a'):
link = url.get('href')
if link.find('mailto')!=-1:
start_email = link.find('mailto')+len('mailto:')
email = link[start_email:]
sheet1.write(count,0,email)
count += 1
wb.save('This is an example.xls')
The code runs fine and it's quite quick. However I'd like to improve it in these ways:
I got the feeling that the for loop could be done in a more elegant
way. Is there any other way to look for the email besides the string find? Just in a similar way in which I found the 'a' tags?
I'd like to be able to evaluate this code with a list of websites(most likely in a spreadsheet) instead of evaluating it only with a url string. I haven't had time to research on how to do this yet but any suggestion is welcome.
Last but not least, I'd like to ask if there's any way to implement this script in some sort of friendly-to-use mini-programme. I mean, for instance, my boss is totally bad at computers: I can't imagine her opening a terminal shell and executing the python code. Instead I'd like to crate some programme where she could just paste the url, or upload a spreadsheet with the websites she wants to extract the emails from, select whether she wants to extract emails or any other information, maybe some more features and then click a button and get the result.
I hope I've expressed myself clearly.
Thanks in advance,
Anqin

Answer 1

As far as BeautifulSoup goes you can search for emails in a in three ways:
1) Use find_all with a lambda to search all tags that are a and have href as an attribute and its value has mailto.
for email in soup.find_all(lambda tag: tag.name == "a" and "href" in tag.attrs and "mailto:" in tag.attrs["href"]):
print (email["href"][7:])
2) Use find_all with regex to find mailto: in an a tag.
for email in soup.find_all("a", href=re.compile("mailto:")):
print (email["href"][7:])
3) Use select to find an a tag on which its href attribute starts with mailto:.
for email in soup.select('a[href^=mailto]'):
print (email["href"][7:])
This is my personal preference, but I prefer using requests over urllib. Far simpler, better at error handling and safer when threading.
As far as your other questions, you can create a method for fetching, parsing and returning the results that you want and pass an url as a parameter. You would only need to loop your list of urls and call that method.
For your boss question you should use a GUI.
Have fun coding.