Method Description

In Beautiful Soup library, the previous_elements property returns a generator object containing the previous strings or tags in the parse tree.

Syntax

Element.previous_elements

Return value

The previous_elements property returns a generator.

Example 1

The previous_elements property returns tags and NavibaleStrings appearing before the <p> tag in the document string below −

html = ''''''
<p><b>Excellent</b><p>Python</p><p id=''id1''>Tutorial</p></p>
''''''
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

soup = BeautifulSoup(html, ''html.parser'')
tag = soup.find(''p'', id=''id1'')

pres = tag.previous_elements
print ("Previous elements:")
for pre in pres:
   print (pre)

Output

Previous elements:
Python
<p>Python</p>
Excellent
<b>Excellent</b>
<p><b>Excellent</b><p>Python</p><p id="id1">Tutorial</p></p>

Example 2

All the elements appearing before the <u> tag are listed below −

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

html = ''''''
<p>
<b>Excellent</b><i>Python</i>
</p>
<u>Tutorial</u>
''''''
soup = BeautifulSoup(html, ''html.parser'')

tag1 = soup.find(''u'')
print ("previous elements:")
print (list(tag1.previous_elements))

Output

previous elements:
[''n'', ''n'', ''Python'', <i>Python</i>, ''Excellent'', <b>Excellent</b>, ''n'', <p>
<b>Excellent</b><i>Python</i>
</p>, ''n'']

Example 3

The BeautifulSoup object itself doesn”t have any previous elements −

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

fp = open("index.html")
soup = BeautifulSoup(fp, ''html5lib'')

tag = soup.find(''input'', id=''marks'')
pres = soup.previous_elements
print ("Previous elements:")
for pre in pres:
   print (pre.name)

Output

Previous elements: