Beautiful Soup | API reference

Beautiful Soup's Tag.append(~) method adds the provided input to the tag's content.

In Beautiful Soup, the clear method removes the inner content of a tag, while keeping the tag itself.

Beautiful Soup's decompose() method removes a tag as well as its inner content.

Beautiful Soup's Tag.extend(~) adds all elements of a list to a Tag in order.

In Beautiful Soup, the extract method removes either: an element and its string, or a string.

Beautiful Soup's find(~) method returns the first tag that matches the search criteria. If you would like to return all tags that match a particular criteria, refer to the find_all(~) method.

Beautiful Soup's find_all(~) method returns a list of all the tags that match a particular criteria.

Beautiful Soup's find_all_next(~) method returns tags that come after the current tag. This method takes in the exact same parameters as find_all(~). If no parameter is specified, then all tags will be returned.

Beautiful Soup's find_next(~) method returns the first tag that comes after the current tag in the document. This method takes in the exact same parameters as find(~).

In Beautiful Soup, the find_next_sibling() method of a tag returns the next element under the same parent.

Beautiful Soup's find_parent(~) method returns the parent of a particular tag (or string).

Beautiful Soup's find_parents(~) method works its way up the parse tree and finds the parents of a particular tag or string.

In Beautiful Soup, the find_previous_sibling() method of a tag returns the next element under the same parent.

Beautiful Soup's Tag.get_text() method returns the text within the tag.

Beautiful Soup's has_attr(~) method returns a Boolean indicating whether an element contains a specific attribute.

Beautiful Soup's Tag.insert(~) method adds the provided input to a tag's content at the provided numeric position.

Beautiful Soup's insert_after(~) method inserts the specified tag or string directly after a particular element in the parse tree.

Beautiful Soup's insert_before(~) method inserts the specified tag or string directly before a particular element in the parse tree.

Beautiful Soup's new_tag(~) method creates a new tag that we can then insert into the parse tree.

Beautiful Soup's prettify() method formats the Beautiful Soup parse tree so that there each tag is on its own separate line with indentation. It is used to easily visualize the structure of the Beautiful Soup parse tree.

Beautiful Soup's replace_with(~) method replaces a tag or string in an element with the provided tag or string.

Beautiful Soup's select(~) method returns a list of all the tags that match a particular criteria.

Beautiful Soup's select_one(~) method returns the first tag that match a particular criteria.

Beautiful Soup's unwrap() method removes the tag from an element and returns it.

Beautiful Soup's wrap(~) method wraps an element with the specified tag and returns the new wrapper.

The Tag.children property in Beautiful Soup returns a generator used to iterate over the immediate child elements and text nodes (i.e. Navigable String).

The Tag.contents property in Beautiful Soup returns a list that contains all the immediate child elements and text nodes (i.e. Navigable String).

The Tag.descendants property in Beautiful Soup returns a generator used to iterate over the all child elements and text nodes (i.e. Navigable String).

In Beautiful Soup, the next_element property returns the next string or tag in the parse tree. We will go through the subtleties of this property using examples.

In Beautiful Soup, the next_elements property of a tag or a string returns a generator used to iterate over all the next strings or tags in the parse tree.

In Beautiful Soup, the next_sibling property of a tag or a string returns the next tag or string under the same parent.

In Beautiful Soup, the next_siblings property of a tag or a string returns a generator used to iterate over all the subsequent tags and strings under the same parent.

The Tag.parent property returns the parent for the particular tag.

The Tag.parents property returns a generator used to iterate over the parent tags.

In Beautiful Soup, the previous_element property returns the previous string or tag in the parse tree. We will go through the subtleties of this property using examples.

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

In Beautiful Soup, the previous_sibling property of a tag or a string returns the previous tag or string under the same parent.

In Beautiful Soup, the previous_siblings property of a tag or a string returns a generator used to iterate over all the previous tags and strings under the same parent.

In Beautiful Soup, the string property returns a NavigableString object, which is similar to a typical Python string with additional helper methods and properties to navigate around the HTML document.

The strings property returns the inner text of an element. Unlike the string property, strings handles the case when the element contains multiple children.

Just like the strings property, the stripped_strings returns the inner text of an element. The difference is that stripped_strings omits lines that consist of just empty spaces, and also removes leading and trailing spaces.