Only extracting text from this element, not its children

Question

I want to extract only the text from the top-most element of my soup; however soup.text gives the text of all the child elements as well:

I have

import BeautifulSoup
soup=BeautifulSoup.BeautifulSoup('<html>yes<b>no</b></html>')
print soup.text

The output to this is yesno. I want simply ‘yes’.

What’s the best way of achieving this?

Edit: I also want yes to be output when parsing ‘<html><b>no</b>yes</html>‘.

Asked By: Dragon

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Source

Answer 1

You could use contents

>>> print soup.html.contents[0]
yes

or to get all the texts under html, use findAll(text=True, recursive=False)

>>> soup = BeautifulSoup.BeautifulSOAP('<html>x<b>no</b>yes</html>')
>>> soup.html.findAll(text=True, recursive=False) 
[u'x', u'yes']

above joined to form a single string

>>> ''.join(soup.html.findAll(text=True, recursive=False)) 
u'xyes'

Answered By: TigrisC

Answer 2

what about .find(text=True)?

>>> BeautifulSoup.BeautifulSOAP('<html>yes<b>no</b></html>').find(text=True)
u'yes'
>>> BeautifulSoup.BeautifulSOAP('<html><b>no</b>yes</html>').find(text=True)
u'no'

EDIT:

I think that I’ve understood what you want now. Try this:

>>> BeautifulSoup.BeautifulSOAP('<html><b>no</b>yes</html>').html.find(text=True, recursive=False)
u'yes'
>>> BeautifulSoup.BeautifulSOAP('<html>yes<b>no</b></html>').html.find(text=True, recursive=False)
u'yes'

Answered By: jbochi

Answer 3

You might want to look into lxml’s soupparser module, which has support for XPath:

>>> from lxml.html.soupparser import fromstring
>>> s1 = '<html>yes<b>no</b></html>'
>>> s2 = '<html><b>no</b>yes</html>'
>>> soup1 = fromstring(s1)
>>> soup2 = fromstring(s2)
>>> soup1.xpath("text()")
['yes']
>>> soup2.xpath("text()")
['yes']

Answered By: mzjn

Answer 4

This works for me in bs4:

import bs4
node = bs4.BeautifulSoup('<html><div>A<span>B</span>C</div></html>').find('div')
print "".join([t for t in node.contents if type(t)==bs4.element.NavigableString])

output:

AC

Answered By: Horst Miller

Only extracting text from this element, not its children

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