Beautiful Soup find first <a> whose title attribute equal a certain string

Question

I'm working with beautiful soup and am trying to grab the first tag on a page that has the attribute equal to a certain string.

For example:

<a href="url" title="export"></a>

What I've been trying to do is grab the href of the first that is found whose title is "export".

• If I use soup.select("a[title='export']") then I end up finding all tags who satisfy this requirement, not just the first.

• If I use find("a", {"title":"export"}) with conditions being set such that the title should equal "export", then it grabs the actual items inside the tag, not the href.

• If I write .get("href") after calling find(), I get None back.

I've been searching the documentation and stack overflow for an answer but have yet found one. Does anyone know a solution to this? Thank you!

Answer 1

What I've been trying to do is grab the href of the first that is found whose title is "export".

You're almost there. All you need to do is, once you've obtained the tag, you'll need to just index it to get the href. Here's a slightly more bulletproof version:

try:
    url = soup.find('a', {'title' : 'export'})['href']  
    print(url)
except TypeError:
    pass