Scraping messy source page with Beautiful Soup - python-2.7

Question

I try to do some web scraping using Python and Beautiful Soup, but the source page of the webpage is not the prettiest. The code below is a minor part of the source page:
...717301758],"birthdayFriends":2,"lastActiveTimes":{"719317510":0,"719435783":0,...
I want to get the parameter '2' after the string 'birthdayFriends', but I have no idea how to get it. So far i have written the code below, but it only prints a empty list.
import urllib2
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
# Create an OpenerDirector with support for Basic HTTP Authentication...
auth_handler = urllib2.HTTPBasicAuthHandler()
auth_handler.add_password(realm='PDQ Application',
uri='myWebpage',
user='myUsername',
passwd='myPassword')
opener = urllib2.build_opener(auth_handler)
# ...and install it globally so it can be used with urlopen.
urllib2.install_opener(opener)
page = urllib2.urlopen('myWebpage')
soup = BeautifulSoup(page.read())
bf = soup.findAll('birthdayFriends')
print bf
>> []

Answer 1

suppose somewhere in the html there is a script tag like the following:
<script>
var x = {"birthdayFriends":2,"lastActiveTimes":{"719317510":0,"719435783":0}}
</script>
then your code might look something like:
script = soup.findAll('script')[0] # or the number it appears in the file
# take the json part
j = bf.text.split('=')[1]
import json
# load json string to a dictionary
d = json.loads(j, strict=False)
print d["birthdayFriends"]
in case the content of the script tag is more complicated, consider loop over the script lines or see How can I parse Javascript variables using python?
also, for parsing JavaScript in python also see pynoceros