Python - webscraping; dictionary data structure - python-2.7

Question

I need to scrape this website (http://setkab.go.id/profil-kabinet/#) and produce an Excel file that has headers "Cabinet names" in column 1 and "Era" in column 2. That means each Cabinet name (e.g. Kabinet Presidensil, Kabinet Sjahrir I) should have its own row - alongside its respective era (e.g. Era Revolusi Fisik, Era Republik Indonesia Serikat).
This is the closest I've gotten:
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
response = requests.get('http://setkab.go.id/profil-kabinet/#')
soup = BeautifulSoup(response.text, 'html.parser')
eras = soup.find_all('div', attrs={'class':"wpb_accordion_section group"})
setkab = {}
for element in eras:
setkab[element.a.get_text()] = {}
for element in eras:
cabname = element.find('div',attrs={'class':'wpb_wrapper'}).get_text()
setkab[element.a.get_text()]['cbnm'] = cabname
for item in setkab.keys():
print item + setkab[item]['cbnm']
import os, csv
os.chdir("/Users/mxcodes/Code")
with open("setkabfinal.csv", "w") as toWrite:
writer = csv.writer(toWrite, delimiter=",")
writer.writerow(["Era", "Cabinet name"])
for a in setkab.keys():
writer.writerow([a.encode("utf-8"), setkab[a]["cbnm"]])
However, this creates an Excel file with the headers "Era" and "Cabinet names" in column 1 and 2, respectively. It fails to put each Cabinet name in a separate row. For example, it has 'Era Revolusi Fisik' in column 1 and lists all the cabinets together in column 2.
My guess is that I need to switch the key-value pairs somehow so that each Cabinet becomes a key and its era becomes its value - because currently it's the other way around. But I've tried and failed to do so. Any help? Thank you!

Answer 1

From what I can see, the cabinets[a]["cbnm"] variable you use for writing is just a long Unicode so when you do writer.writerow([a.encode("utf-8"), cabinets[a]["cbnm"]]) what actually happens is that you write the era at the first column and the whole Unicode in the single cell in the next column (even if you have \n in your string it does not prevent it from being writed in a single cell (csv actually think that you want the unicode to be in ONLY one cell so it puts " before and after the cabinets[a]["cbnm"] value to be sure it will actually be in one cell)), what you should do to write every cabinet value in another row is to use the writerow method separately for each desired row.
for example this code worked fine for me:
cabinets = setkab
with open("cabinets.csv", "w") as toWrite:
writer = csv.writer(toWrite, delimiter=",")
writer.writerow(["Era", "Cabinet name"])
for a in setkab.keys():
writer.writerow([a.encode("utf-8")]) #write the era column
cabinets_list = [i for i in cabinets[a]["cbnm"].split('\n') if i != ''] #get all the values that are separated by newline chars (if they aren't empty strings)
for i in cabinets_list: writer.writerow([a.encode("utf-8"),i]) #write every value separately in the CABINET NAME row
as you can see I changed only the last 3 lines.
I hope this will help you!