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The Tag object in Beautiful Soup possesses two useful properties that give the information about its position in the HTML document. They are −
sourceline − line number at which the tag is found
sourcepos − The starting index of the tag in the line in which it is found.
These properties are supported by the html.parser which is Python”s in-built parser and html5lib parser. They are not available when you are using lmxl parser.
In the following example, a HTML string is parsed with html.parser and we find the line number and position of <p> tag in the HTML string.
Example
html = ''''''
<html>
<body>
<p>Web frameworks</p>
<ul>
<li>Django</li>
<li>Flask</li>
</ul>
<p>GUI frameworks</p>
<ol>
<li>Tkinter</li>
<li>PyQt</li>
</ol>
</body>
</html>
''''''
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
soup = BeautifulSoup(html, ''html.parser'')
p_tags = soup.find_all(''p'')
for p in p_tags:
print (p.sourceline, p.sourcepos, p.string)
Output
4 0 Web frameworks 9 0 GUI frameworks
For html.parser, these numbers represent the position of the initial less-than sign, which is 0 in this example. It is slightly different when html5lib parser is used.
Example
html = ''''''
<html>
<body>
<p>Web frameworks</p>
<ul>
<li>Django</li>
<li>Flask</li>
</ul>
<p>GUI frameworks</p>
<ol>
<li>Tkinter</li>
<li>PyQt</li>
</ol>
</body>
</html>
''''''
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
soup = BeautifulSoup(html, ''html5lib'')
li_tags = soup.find_all(''li'')
for l in li_tags:
print (l.sourceline, l.sourcepos, l.string)
Output
6 3 Django 7 3 Flask 11 3 Tkinter 12 3 PyQt
When using html5lib, the sourcepos property returns the position of the final greater-than sign.
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