Scrape GitHub README badges

Scraping GitHub README badges involves extracting the badge images (typically displayed using Markdown syntax) from the README.md file of a GitHub repository. These badges are commonly used to display project status, test coverage, license, dependencies, etc.

Here’s a step-by-step Python script using requests and BeautifulSoup to scrape README badges from a public GitHub repository:

python
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import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import re

def extract_readme_badges(repo_url):
    # Convert GitHub URL to raw README.md URL
    if repo_url.endswith('/'):
        repo_url = repo_url[:-1]
    user_repo = '/'.join(repo_url.split('/')[-2:])
    raw_url = f"https://raw.githubusercontent.com/{user_repo}/master/README.md"

    # Try alternative default branch if needed
    response = requests.get(raw_url)
    if response.status_code != 200:
        raw_url = f"https://raw.githubusercontent.com/{user_repo}/main/README.md"
        response = requests.get(raw_url)

    if response.status_code != 200:
        print("Could not retrieve README.md")
        return []

    readme_content = response.text

    # Regex pattern to match Markdown image syntax: ![alt](url)
    badge_pattern = r'![.*?]((.*?))'
    badges = re.findall(badge_pattern, readme_content)

    # Filter URLs that look like badge images (from shields.io, etc.)
    badge_urls = [url for url in badges if 'badge' in url or 'shields.io' in url or 'img.shields.io' in url]

    return badge_urls

# Example usage
repo = "https://github.com/facebook/react"
badges = extract_readme_badges(repo)
for badge in badges:
    print(badge)

How it Works:

• Extracts the README.md from the master or main branch.

• Parses Markdown image links using regex.

• Filters likely badge URLs (commonly from shields.io, badgen.net, etc.).

Output Example:

arduino
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https://img.shields.io/badge/build-passing-brightgreen
https://img.shields.io/npm/v/react.svg

You can extend this to:

• Parse badges inside HTML (<img> tags).

• Identify badge types using URL patterns.

• Display badge alt texts and links.

Let me know if you need this in another language or want to scan multiple repos.