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Beautiful Soup | previous_sibling property

schedule Aug 12, 2023
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PythonBeautiful Soup
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In Beautiful Soup, the previous_sibling property of a tag or a string returns the previous tag or string under the same parent.

Examples

Basic usage

Consider the following HTML document:

my_html = "<p><b>Alex</b><i>is great</i></p>"
soup = BeautifulSoup(my_html)

Let's get the previous_sibling of <i>is great</i>:

i_tag = soup.find("i")
i_tag.previous_sibling
<b>Alex</b>

This tell us that the previous node of <i>is great</i> is <b>Alex</b>, which we know is true since <b>Alex</b> is the previous element under the same p tag.

If the previous node does not exist, then a None is returned:

i_tag = soup.find("i")
i_tag.previous_sibling.previous_sibling
None

Unexpected behaviour

Consider the following HTML document:

my_html = """
   <div>
      <p>Alex</p>
      <p id="bob">Bob</p>
   </div>
"""
soup = BeautifulSoup(my_html)

Let's get the previous_sibling of <p id="bob">Bob</p>:

p_bob = soup.find(id="bob")
p_bob.previous_sibling
'\n'

The result may be surprising for those who expected to see <p>Bob</p>. Such a result arises because there is a new line character \n between <b>Alex</b> and <b>Bob</b>. To get to Alex, then, you would need to call the previous_sibling twice:

p_bob = soup.find(id="bob")
p_bob.previous_sibling.previous_sibling
<p>Bob</p>

If you just wanted to access the previous element, then the better alternative would be to call the find_previous_sibling() method:

p_bob = soup.find(id="bob")
<p>Alex</p>
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Published by Isshin Inada
Edited by 0 others
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