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Beautiful Soup | extract method

schedule Aug 12, 2023
Last updated
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PythonBeautiful Soup
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In Beautiful Soup, the extract method removes either:

  • an element and its string

  • a string

The method returns whatever it removed.

Examples

Consider the following HTML document:

my_html = """
   <div>
      <p>Bob is great</p>
   </div>
"""
soup = BeautifulSoup(my_html)

Removing a tag and its content

To remove the p tag as well as its inner content:

div_tag = soup.find("div")
p_tag = div_tag.find("p")
p_tag.extract()
<p>Bob is great</p>

Here, we see <p>Bob is great</p> as the output because the extract() method returns whatever you've removed.

After calling extract() on the p tag, it is no longer part of our parse tree:

print(div_tag)
<div>
</div>

However, the catch is that, although the p tag has been detached from our parse tree, it still exists in memory, and we can still access it:

print(p_tag)
<p>Bob is great</p>

If you want to completely remove the p_tag, then call the decompose() method instead of extract().

Removing a string

To remove the inner text of p:

tag_div = soup.find("div")
tag_div.find("p").string.extract()
tag_div
<div>
<p></p>
</div>
robocat
Published by Isshin Inada
Edited by 0 others
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