Unboundlocalerror: Local Variable 'soup' Referenced Before Assignment

I'm extremely new to Python and this is my first real project. I am trying to make a web crawler and getting this error import requests from bs4 import BeautifulSoup def main

Solution 1:

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup


def main_spider(max_pages):
    page = 1
    while page < max_pages:
         url = "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars" + str(page)
         source_code = requests.get(url)
         plain_text = source_code.text
         soup = BeautifulSoup(plain_text)
         for link in soup.findAll("a"):
             href = link.get("href")
             print(href)
    page += 1main_spider(1)

In your case, soup has a local scope of the while loop, so you can only access it inside the while.

Since it appears you're doing soup on single pages (and using the while loop to move between pages), I believe you want your soup.findAll('a') to be inside the while loop (AKA on a per page basis).

Solution 2:

UnboundLocalError means there is a code path where a local variable is not assigned before use. In this case, soup is used after a while loop assigning the variable completes. The code doesn't consider the case where the while loop never runs.

That exposes other bugs. First, the for loop should be indented so that it runs inside the while. Second, why didn't the outer loop run? That was simply a case of a typo in the conditional: <+ should have been <=.