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Approach: Here we first import the regular expressions and BeautifulSoup libraries. Then we open the HTML file using the open function which we want to parse. Then using the find_all function, we find a particular tag that we pass inside that function and also the text we want to have within the tag.
You should post your example document, because the code works fine:
>>> import BeautifulSoup
>>> soup = BeautifulSoup.BeautifulSoup('<html><body><div id="articlebody"> ... </div></body></html')
>>> soup.find("div", {"id": "articlebody"})
<div id="articlebody"> ... </div>
Finding <div>s inside <div>s works as well:
>>> soup = BeautifulSoup.BeautifulSoup('<html><body><div><div id="articlebody"> ... </div></div></body></html')
>>> soup.find("div", {"id": "articlebody"})
<div id="articlebody"> ... </div>
To find an element by its id:
div = soup.find(id="articlebody")
Beautiful Soup 4 supports most CSS selectors with the .select() method, therefore you can use an id selector such as:
soup.select('#articlebody')
If you need to specify the element's type, you can add a type selector before the id selector:
soup.select('div#articlebody')
The .select() method will return a collection of elements, which means that it would return the same results as the following .find_all() method example:
soup.find_all('div', id="articlebody")
# or
soup.find_all(id="articlebody")
If you only want to select a single element, then you could just use the .find() method:
soup.find('div', id="articlebody")
# or
soup.find(id="articlebody")
I think there is a problem when the 'div' tags are too much nested. I am trying to parse some contacts from a facebook html file, and the Beautifulsoup is not able to find tags "div" with class "fcontent".
This happens with other classes as well. When I search for divs in general, it turns only those that are not so much nested.
The html source code can be any page from facebook of the friends list of a friend of you (not the one of your friends). If someone can test it and give some advice I would really appreciate it.
This is my code, where I just try to print the number of tags "div" with class "fcontent":
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
f = open('/Users/myUserName/Desktop/contacts.html')
soup = BeautifulSoup(f)
list = soup.findAll('div', attrs={'class':'fcontent'})
print len(list)
Most probably because of the default beautifulsoup parser has problem. Change a different parser, like 'lxml' and try again.
In the beautifulsoup source this line allows divs to be nested within divs; so your concern in lukas' comment wouldn't be valid.
NESTABLE_BLOCK_TAGS = ['blockquote', 'div', 'fieldset', 'ins', 'del']
What I think you need to do is to specify the attrs you want such as
source.find('div', attrs={'id':'articlebody'})
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