Scraping columns from SEDE results

I use the following script to download the result of a SEDE query and scrape a specific column from it using BeautifulSoup:

import json

def extract_column(soup, colname):
    """
    Returns a generator of cell values in selected column.

    For simple columns like timestamp, a cell value can be simple,
    for example: 1414433013197

    For more complex columns like Post Link, a cell value can be an object,
    for example:

      {
        "id": 68102,
        "title": "Bash Script - File Comment out & Notate"
      }

    :param soup: a bs4 (BeautifulSoup) object
    :param colname: name of the SEDE column to extract
    :return: generator of cell values in selected column
    """
    def get_column_index():
        for index, info in enumerate(columns):
            if info['name'] == colname:
                return index
        return -1

    for script in soup.findAll('script'):
        result_sets_col = 'resultSets'
        if result_sets_col in script.text:
            start = script.text.rindex('{', 0, script.text.index(result_sets_col))
            end = script.text.index('}', script.text.index('querySetId')) + 1
            data = json.loads(script.text[start:end])

            results = data[result_sets_col][0]
            columns = results['columns']
            rows = results['rows']

            column_index = get_column_index()
            if column_index > -1:
                for row in rows:
                    yield row[column_index]

Unit tests:

```
import os
import unittest

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
from robosanta.stackexchange.sede import extract_column

BASE_DIR = os.path.dirname(__file__)

SEDE_OUTPUT_HTML = os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'sede-output.html')
POST_ID_COLUMN = 'Post Link'
DATE_COLUMN = 'CreationDate'
ROW_COUNT = 49

def new_soup():
with open(SEDE_OUTPUT_HTML) as fh:
return BeautifulSoup(fh)

class TestGetColumn(unittest.TestCase):
def extract_column(self, colname):
return extract_column(new_s

I'd test if not result_sets_col in script.text and continue in that case, to remove a level of nesting:

for script in soup.findAll('script'):
    result_sets_col = 'resultSets'
    if not result_sets_col in script.text:
        continue

    start = script.text.rindex('{', 0, script.text.index(result_sets_col))

StackExchange Code Review Q#113654, answer score: 3