Beautiful Soup Using Regex to Find Tags?

Question

I’d really like to be able to allow Beautiful Soup to match any list of tags, like so. I know attr accepts regex, but is there anything in beautiful soup that allows you to do so?

soup.findAll("(a|div)")

Output:

<a> ASDFS
<div> asdfasdf
<a> asdfsdf

My goal is to create a scraper that can grab tables from sites. Sometimes tags are named inconsistently, and I’d like to be able to input a list of tags to name the ‘data’ part of a table.

Asked By: user3314418

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Source

Answer 1

yes see docs…

http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/bs3/documentation.html

import re

soup.findAll(re.compile("^a$|(div)"))

Answered By: ZJS

Answer 2

find_all() is the most favored method in the Beautiful Soup search API.

You can pass a variation of filters. Also, pass a list to find multiple tags:

>>> soup.find_all(['a', 'div'])

Example:

>>> from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
>>> soup = BeautifulSoup('<html><body><div>asdfasdf</div><p><a>foo</a></p></body></html>')
>>> soup.find_all(['a', 'div'])
[<div>asdfasdf</div>, <a>foo</a>]

Or you can use a regular expression to find tags that contain a or div:

>>> import re
>>> soup.find_all(re.compile("(a|div)"))

Answered By: hwnd

Answer 3

Note that you can also use regular expressions to search in attributes of tags. For example:

import re
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

soup.find_all('a', {'href': re.compile(r'crummy.com/')})

This example finds all <a> tags that link to a website containing the substring 'crummy.com'.

Answered By: Manu CJ

Beautiful Soup Using Regex to Find Tags?

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