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Method Description
In Beautiful Soup library, the previous_element property returns the Tag or NavigableString that appears immediately prior to the current PageElement, even if it is out of the parent tree. There is also a previous property which has similar behaviour
Syntax
Element.previous_element
Return value
The previous_element and previous properties return a tag or a NavigableString appearing immediately before the current tag.
Example 1
In the document tree parsed from the given HTML string, we find the previous_element of the <p id=”id1”> tag
html = ''''''
<p><b>Excellent</b><p>Python</p><p id=''id1''>Tutorial</p></p>
''''''
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
soup = BeautifulSoup(html, ''lxml'')
tag = soup.find(''p'', id=''id1'')
print (tag)
pre = tag.previous_element
print ("Previous:",pre)
pre = tag.previous_element.previous_element
print ("Previous:",pre)
Output
<p id="id1">Tutorial</p> Previous: Python Previous: <p>Python</p>
The output is a little strange as the previous element for shown to be ”Python, that is because the inner string is registered as the previous element. To obtain the desired result (<p>Python</p>) as the previous element, fetch the previous_element property of the inner NavigableString object.
Example 2
The BeautifulSoup PageElements also supports previous property which is analogous to previous_element property
html = ''''''
<p><b>Excellent</b><p>Python</p><p id=''id1''>Tutorial</p></p>
''''''
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
soup = BeautifulSoup(html, ''lxml'')
tag = soup.find(''p'', id=''id1'')
print (tag)
pre = tag.previous
print ("Previous:",pre)
pre = tag.previous.previous
print ("Previous:",pre)
Output
<p id="id1">Tutorial</p> Previous: Python Previous: <p>Python</p>
Example 3
In the next example, we try to determine the element next to <input> tag whose id attribute is ”age”
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
fp = open("index.html")
soup = BeautifulSoup(fp, ''html5lib'')
tag = soup.find(''input'', id=''age'')
pre = tag.previous_element.previous
print ("Previous:",pre)
Output
Previous: <input id="nm" name="name" type="text"/>
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