Beautiful Soup – Navigating by Tags
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One of the important pieces of element in any piece of HTML document are tags, which may contain other tags/strings (tag”s children). Beautiful Soup provides different ways to navigate and iterate over”s tag”s children.
Easiest way to search a parse tree is to search the tag by its name.
soup.head
The soup.head function returns the contents put inside the <head> .. </head> element of a HTML page.
Consider the following HTML page to be scraped:
<html>
<head>
<title>TutorialsPoint</title>
<script>
document.write(“Welcome to TutorialsPoint”);
</script>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Tutorialspoint Online Library</h1>
<p><b>It”s all Free</b></p>
</body>
</html>
Following code extracts the contents of <head> element
Example
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
with open(“index.html”) as fp:
soup = BeautifulSoup(fp, ”html.parser”)
print(soup.head)
Output
<head>
<title>TutorialsPoint</title>
<script>
document.write(“Welcome to TutorialsPoint”);
</script>
</head>
soup.body
Similarly, to return the contents of body part of HTML page, use soup.body
Example
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
with open(“index.html”) as fp:
soup = BeautifulSoup(fp, ”html.parser”)
print (soup.body)
Output
<body>
<h1>Tutorialspoint Online Library</h1>
<p><b>It”s all Free</b></p>
</body>
You can also extract specific tag (like first <h1> tag) in the <body> tag.
Example
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
with open(“index.html”) as fp:
soup = BeautifulSoup(fp, ”html.parser”)
print(soup.body.h1)
Output
<h1>Tutorialspoint Online Library</h1>
soup.p
Our HTML file contains a <p> tag. We can extract the contents of this tag
Example
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
with open(“index.html”) as fp:
soup = BeautifulSoup(fp, ”html.parser”)
print(soup.p)
Output
<p><b>It”s all Free</b></p>
Tag.contents
A Tag object may have one or more PageElements. The Tag object”s contents property returns a list of all elements included in it.
Let us find the elements in <head> tag of our index.html file.
Example
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
with open(“index.html”) as fp:
soup = BeautifulSoup(fp, ”html.parser”)
tag = soup.head
print (tag.contents)
Output
[”n”,
<title>TutorialsPoint</title>,
”n”,
<script>
document.write(“Welcome to TutorialsPoint”);
</script>,
”n”]
Tag.children
The structure of tags in a HTML script is hierarchical. The elements are nested one inside the other. For example, the top level <HTML> tag includes <HEAD> and <BODY> tags, each may have other tags in it.
The Tag object has a children property that returns a list iterator object containing the enclosed PageElements.
To demonstrate the children property, we shall use the following HTML script (index.html). In the <body> section, there are two <ul> list elements, one nested in another. In other words, the body tag has top level list elements, and each list element has another list under it.
<html>
<head>
<title>TutorialsPoint</title>
</head>
<body>
<h2>Departmentwise Employees</h2>
<ul>
<li>Accounts</li>
<ul>
<li>Anand</li>
<li>Mahesh</li>
</ul>
<li>HR</li>
<ul>
<li>Rani</li>
<li>Ankita</li>
</ul>
</ul>
</body>
</html>
The following Python code gives a list of all the children elements of top level <ul> tag.
Example
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
with open(“index.html”) as fp:
soup = BeautifulSoup(fp, ”html.parser”)
tag = soup.ul
print (list(tag.children))
Output
[”n”, <li>Accounts</li>, ”n”, <ul>
<li>Anand</li>
<li>Mahesh</li>
</ul>, ”n”, <li>HR</li>, ”n”, <ul>
<li>Rani</li>
<li>Ankita</li>
</ul>, ”n”]
Since the .children property returns a list_iterator, we can use a for loop to traverse the hierarchy.
Example
for child in tag.children:
print (child)
Output
<li>Accounts</li>
<ul>
<li>Anand</li>
<li>Mahesh</li>
</ul>
<li>HR</li>
<ul>
<li>Rani</li>
<li>Ankita</li>
</ul>
Tag.find_all()
This method returns a result set of contents of all the tags matching with the argument tag provided.
Let us consider the following HTML page(index.html) for this −
<html>
<body>
<h1>Tutorialspoint Online Library</h1>
<p><b>It”s all Free</b></p>
<a class=”prog” href=”https://www.tutorialspoint.com/java/java_overview.htm” id=”link1″>Java</a>
<a class=”prog” href=”https://www.tutorialspoint.com/cprogramming/index.htm” id=”link2″>C</a>
<a class=”prog” href=”https://www.tutorialspoint.com/python/index.htm” id=”link3″>Python</a>
<a class=”prog” href=”https://www.tutorialspoint.com/javascript/javascript_overview.htm” id=”link4″>JavaScript</a>
<a class=”prog” href=”https://www.tutorialspoint.com/ruby/index.htm” id=”link5″>C</a>
</body>
</html>
The following code lists all the elements with <a> tag
Example
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
with open(“index.html”) as fp:
soup = BeautifulSoup(fp, ”html.parser”)
result = soup.find_all(“a”)
print (result)
Output
[
<a class=”prog” href=”https://www.tutorialspoint.com/java/java_overview.htm” id=”link1″>Java</a>,
<a class=”prog” href=”https://www.tutorialspoint.com/cprogramming/index.htm” id=”link2″>C</a>,
<a class=”prog” href=”https://www.tutorialspoint.com/python/index.htm” id=”link3″>Python</a>,
<a class=”prog” href=”https://www.tutorialspoint.com/javascript/javascript_overview.htm” id=”link4″>JavaScript</a>,
<a class=”prog” href=”https://www.tutorialspoint.com/ruby/index.htm” id=”link5″>C</a>
]
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