Finding elements Cookbook

Finding elements by class Finding elements by id Finding elements that are direct descendants Finding elements that contain a specific text Finding elements by tag name Finding elements that contain all the specified classes Finding elements that only contain specific attributes and no other attributes Finding elements using regular expression Limiting the number of returned results Finding elements by attribute

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Finding elements using regular expression in Beautiful Soup

Programming

Python

Beautiful Soup

Cookbooks

Finding elements Cookbook

Jul 1, 2022

Last updated

local_offer Python●Beautiful Soup

Example

Consider the following HTML document:


        
        
            
                
                
                    my_html = """
       <p>A cat sat</p>
       <p>on a mat</p>
"""
soup = BeautifulSoup(my_html)

To find all elements that contain the words "cat" and "mat":


        
        
            
                
                
                    my_regex = re.compile("[cm]at")
matched_strings = soup.find_all(text=my_regex)

for matched_string in matched_strings:
       print(matched_string.parent)
                
            
            <p>A cat sat</p>
<p>on a mat</p>

Since we've specified the text parameter, the return value of find_all(~) is a list of NavigableString objects. These objects are just like your standard Python string, except that they have helper properties and methods to navigate around the HTML document. Here, we're using its parent property, which returns the enclosing Tag object.

Published by Isshin Inada

Edited by 0 others

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