Extract content within a tag with BeautifulSoup

Question

I'd like to extract the content Hello world. Please note that there are multiples <table> and similar <td colspan="2"> on the page as well:

<table border="0" cellspacing="2" width="800">   <tr>     <td colspan="2"><b>Name: </b>Hello world</td>   </tr>   <tr> ... 

I tried the following:

hello = soup.find(text='Name: ') hello.findPreviousSiblings 

But it returned nothing.

In addition, I'm also having problem with the following extracting the My home address:

<td><b>Address:</b></td>  <td>My home address</td> 

I'm also using the same method to search for the text="Address: " but how do I navigate down to the next line and extract the content of <td>?

Answer 1

The contents operator works well for extracting text from <tag>text</tag> .

---

<td>My home address</td> example:

s = '<td>My home address</td>' soup =  BeautifulSoup(s) td = soup.find('td') #<td>My home address</td> td.contents #My home address 

---

<td><b>Address:</b></td> example:

s = '<td><b>Address:</b></td>' soup =  BeautifulSoup(s) td = soup.find('td').find('b') #<b>Address:</b> td.contents #Address: 

Answer 2

use next instead

>>> s = '<table border="0" cellspacing="2" width="800"><tr><td colspan="2"><b>Name: </b>Hello world</td></tr><tr>' >>> soup = BeautifulSoup(s) >>> hello = soup.find(text='Name: ') >>> hello.next u'Hello world' 

next and previous let you move through the document elements in the order they were processed by the parser while sibling methods work with the parse tree