First Scrape

#import the necessary libraries & modules
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests


#link to be scraped assigned to a variable
wiki_page = 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_S%26P_500_companies'

#A function that gets the URL of the page to be scraped
#,gets the html content and uses BeautifulSoup to parse html content

def make_soup(link):
    get_page = requests.get(link)
    html = get_page.content
    soup = BeautifulSoup(html, 'html.parser')
    return  soup

soup = make_soup(wiki_page)

table = soup.find('table', attrs={'class': 'wikitable'})  # find the table
tickers = []

for row in table.find_all('tr')[1:]:  # iterate over the rows, starting from
                                      # the second (first one is the header row)
    symbol_cell = row.find_all('td')[0]  #  the Symbol col is the first <td> in every row
    tickers.append(symbol_cell.text)

print (tickers)