How to select the previous tag when re finds the str

Question

I have an HTML file like this:(More than 100 records)

<div class="cell-62 pl-1 pt-0_5">
    <h3 class="very-big-text light-text">John Smith</h3>
        <span class="light-text">Center - VAR - Employee I</span>
</div>

<div class="cell-62 pl-1 pt-0_5">
    <h3 class="very-big-text light-text">Jenna Smith</h3>
        <span class="light-text">West - VAR - Employee I</span>
</div>

<div class="cell-62 pl-1 pt-0_5">
    <h3 class="very-big-text light-text">Jordan Smith</h3>
        <span class="light-text">East - VAR - Employee II</span>
</div>

I need to extract the names IF they are Employee I, which makes it challenging. How can I select those tags that have Employee I in the next tag? Or should I use a different method? Is it even possible to use condition in this case?

with open("file.html", 'r') as input:
html = input.read()
    print(re.search(r'bEmployee Ib',html).group(0))

Like, how can I specify to go to read previous tag?

Asked By: user15109593

||

Source

Answer 1

import re
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

with open('inputfile.html', encoding='utf-8') as fp:
    soup = BeautifulSoup(fp.read(), 'html.parser')

names = [span.parent.find('h3').string 
         for span in 
         soup.find_all('span', 
                       class_='light-text', 
                       string=re.compile('Employee I$'))
        ]
print(names)

gives

['John Smith', 'Jenna Smith']

I’ve formatted the list comprehension over several lines, for clarity, so that it may be easier to see where to adjust things accordingly to other use cases. Of course, a normal for-loop and appending to a list also works fine; I just like list comprehensions.

The re.compile('Employee I$') is necessary to avoid matching on 'Employee II'. The class_ argument is an extra, and may not be needed.

The rest is near self-explanatory, especially with the BeautifulSoup documentation next to it.

Note that if the .string attribute used to be .text, in case you’re using an older version of BeautifulSoup.

Answered By: 9769953

Answer 2

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

test = '''<div class="cell-62 pl-1 pt-0_5">
        <h3 class="very-big-text light-text">John Smith</h3>
                <span class="light-text">Center - VAR - Employee I</span>
        </div>

        <div class="cell-62 pl-1 pt-0_5">
            <h3 class="very-big-text light-text">Jenna Smith</h3>
                <span class="light-text">West - VAR - Employee I</span>
        </div>

        <div class="cell-62 pl-1 pt-0_5">
            <h3 class="very-big-text light-text">Jordan Smith</h3>
                <span class="light-text">East - VAR - Employee II</span>
        </div>'''

soup = BeautifulSoup(test)
for person in soup.findAll('div'):
    names = person.find('h3').text
    employee_nb = person.find('span').text.split('-')[2].strip()
    if employee_nb == "Employee I":
        print(names)

Answered By: inarighas

Answer 3

You could also use css selectors to select your elements more specific.

As of version 4.7.0, Beautiful Soup supports most CSS4 selectors via the SoupSieve project. If you installed Beautiful Soup through pip, SoupSieve was installed at the same time, so you don’t have to do anything extra.

Example

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

html = '''
<div class="cell-62 pl-1 pt-0_5">
    <h3 class="very-big-text light-text">John Smith</h3>
        <span class="light-text">Center - VAR - Employee I</span>
</div>

<div class="cell-62 pl-1 pt-0_5">
    <h3 class="very-big-text light-text">Jenna Smith</h3>
        <span class="light-text">West - VAR - Employee I</span>
</div>

<div class="cell-62 pl-1 pt-0_5">
    <h3 class="very-big-text light-text">Jordan Smith</h3>
        <span class="light-text">East - VAR - Employee II</span>
</div>
'''
soup = BeautifulSoup(html)

[e.text for e in soup.select('h3:has(+:-soup-contains("Employee"))')]

Output

['John Smith', 'Jenna Smith', 'Jordan Smith']

Answered By: HedgeHog

How to select the previous tag when re finds the str

Question:

Answers:

Example

Output