We can get data from web pages with Beautiful Soup.
It lets us parse the DOM and extract the data we want.
In this article, we’ll look at how to scrape HTML documents with Beautiful Soup.
.next_element and .previous_element
We can get sibling elements with the .next_element and .previous_element properties.
For example, we can write:
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
html_doc = """<html><head><title>The Dormouse's story</title></head>
<body>
<p class="title"><b>The Dormouse's story</b></p>
<p class="story">Once upon a time there were three little sisters; and their names were
<a href="http://example.com/elsie" class="sister" id="link1">Elsie</a>,
<a href="http://example.com/lacie" class="sister" id="link2">Lacie</a> and
<a href="http://example.com/tillie" class="sister" id="link3">Tillie</a>;
and they lived at the bottom of a well.</p>
<p class="story">...</p>
"""
soup = BeautifulSoup(html_doc, 'html.parser')
last_a_tag = soup.find("a", id="link3")
print(last_a_tag.next_element)
We get the a element with the ID link3 .
Then we get the element next to it with the next_element property.
So we see:
Tillie
printed.
We can also get the previous element with the previous_element property:
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
html_doc = """<html><head><title>The Dormouse's story</title></head>
<body>
<p class="title"><b>The Dormouse's story</b></p>
<p class="story">Once upon a time there were three little sisters; and their names were
<a href="http://example.com/elsie" class="sister" id="link1">Elsie</a>,
<a href="http://example.com/lacie" class="sister" id="link2">Lacie</a> and
<a href="http://example.com/tillie" class="sister" id="link3">Tillie</a>;
and they lived at the bottom of a well.</p>
<p class="story">...</p>
"""
soup = BeautifulSoup(html_doc, 'html.parser')
last_a_tag = soup.find("a", id="link3")
print(last_a_tag.previous_element)
And we see:
and
printed.
find_all()
We can find all elements with the given selector with the find_all method.
For example, we can write:
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
html_doc = """<html><head><title>The Dormouse's story</title></head>
<body>
<p class="title"><b>The Dormouse's story</b></p>
<p class="story">Once upon a time there were three little sisters; and their names were
<a href="http://example.com/elsie" class="sister" id="link1">Elsie</a>,
<a href="http://example.com/lacie" class="sister" id="link2">Lacie</a> and
<a href="http://example.com/tillie" class="sister" id="link3">Tillie</a>;
and they lived at the bottom of a well.</p>
<p class="story">...</p>
"""
soup = BeautifulSoup(html_doc, 'html.parser')
print(soup.find_all("title"))
to get all the title elements, so we see:
[<title>The Dormouse's story</title>]
printed.
We can get more than one kind of element. For example, we can write:
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
html_doc = """<html><head><title>The Dormouse's story</title></head>
<body>
<p class="title"><b>The Dormouse's story</b></p>
<p class="story">Once upon a time there were three little sisters; and their names were
<a href="http://example.com/elsie" class="sister" id="link1">Elsie</a>,
<a href="http://example.com/lacie" class="sister" id="link2">Lacie</a> and
<a href="http://example.com/tillie" class="sister" id="link3">Tillie</a>;
and they lived at the bottom of a well.</p>
<p class="story">...</p>
"""
soup = BeautifulSoup(html_doc, 'html.parser')
print(soup.find_all("p", "title"))
Then we get:
[<p class="title"><b>The Dormouse's story</b></p>]
logged.
The Keyword Arguments
We can pass in other selectors.
For example, we can write:
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
html_doc = """<html><head><title>The Dormouse's story</title></head>
<body>
<p class="title"><b>The Dormouse's story</b></p>
<p class="story">Once upon a time there were three little sisters; and their names were
<a href="http://example.com/elsie" class="sister" id="link1">Elsie</a>,
<a href="http://example.com/lacie" class="sister" id="link2">Lacie</a> and
<a href="http://example.com/tillie" class="sister" id="link3">Tillie</a>;
and they lived at the bottom of a well.</p>
<p class="story">...</p>
"""
soup = BeautifulSoup(html_doc, 'html.parser')
print(soup.find_all(id='link2'))
and get the a element with ID link2 .
We can also pass in a regex object to select nodes:
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import re
html_doc = """<html><head><title>The Dormouse's story</title></head>
<body>
<p class="title"><b>The Dormouse's story</b></p>
<p class="story">Once upon a time there were three little sisters; and their names were
<a href="http://example.com/elsie" class="sister" id="link1">Elsie</a>,
<a href="http://example.com/lacie" class="sister" id="link2">Lacie</a> and
<a href="http://example.com/tillie" class="sister" id="link3">Tillie</a>;
and they lived at the bottom of a well.</p>
<p class="story">...</p>
"""
soup = BeautifulSoup(html_doc, 'html.parser')
print(soup.find_all(href=re.compile("elsie")))
We get all the elements with href that has the substring 'elsie' .
So we get:
[<a class="sister" href="http://example.com/elsie" id="link1">Elsie</a>]
printed.
We can also search for nodes with the given attributes.
To do that, we write:
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import re
soup = BeautifulSoup('<div data-foo="value">foo!</div>', 'html.parser')
print(soup.find_all(attrs={"data-foo": "value"}))
We get the nodes with the data-foo attribute set to value .
So we see:
[<div data-foo="value">foo!</div>]
printed.
To search for node with a given name element value, we can write:
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
name_soup = BeautifulSoup('<input name="email"/>', 'html.parser')
print(name_soup.find_all(attrs={"name": "email"}))
Then we get:
[<input name="email"/>]
logged.
Conclusion
We can get nodes at various locations and with various attributes with Beautiful Soup.
