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Beautiful Soup cannot find a CSS class if the object has other classes, too
I'm using BeautifulSoup to find tables in the HTML. The problem I am currently running into is the use of spaces in the class attribute. If my HTML reads <html><table class="wikitable sortable">blah</table></html>, I can't seem to extract it with the following (where I was to be able to find tables with both wikipedia and wikipedia sortable for the class):
BeautifulSoup(html).findAll(attrs={'class':re.compile("wikitable( sortable)?")})
This will find the table if my HTML is just <html><table class="wikitable">blah</table></html> though. Likewise, I have tried using "wikitable sortable" in my regular expression, and that won't match either. Any ideas?
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The pattern match will also fail if wikitable appears after another CSS class, as in class="something wikitable other", so if you want all tables whose class attribute contains the class wikitable, you need a pattern that accepts more possibilities:
html = '''<html><table class="sortable wikitable other">blah</table>
<table class="wikitable sortable">blah</table>
<table class="wikitable"><blah></table></html>'''
tree = BeautifulSoup(html)
for node in tree.findAll(attrs={'class': re.compile(r".*\bwikitable\b.*")}):
print node
Result:
<table class="sortable wikitable other">blah</table>
<table class="wikitable sortable">blah</table>
<table class="wikitable"><blah></blah></table>
Just for the record, I don't use BeautifulSoup, and prefer to use lxml, as others have mentioned.
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