Beautiful Soup Select Vs Find_all data Type

Question

I am new to webscraping, and there seems to be two ways to gather ALL html data I am looking for.

option_1 = soup.find_all('div', class_='p')

option_2 = soup.select('div.p')

I see that option_1 returns class 'bs4.element.ResultSet' and option_2 returns class 'list'

I can still iterate through option_1 with a for loop, so what is the difference between:

1. select and find_all
2. 'list' and bs4.element.ResultSet

Answer 1

You should find the answer to your first question here (linked by t-m-adam in the comments).

As for the second question let's take a look at the source code :)

class ResultSet(list):
    """A ResultSet is just a list that keeps track of the SoupStrainer
    that created it."""
    def __init__(self, source, result=()):
        super(ResultSet, self).__init__(result)
        self.source = source

    def __getattr__(self, key):
        raise AttributeError(
            "ResultSet object has no attribute '%s'. You're probably treating a list of items like a single item. Did you call find_all() when you meant to call find()?" % key
        )

ResultSet is just a subclass of list used to store results of find_all() method.