Find the selected option using BeautifulSoup

Question

I would like to only get the selected options of a select. For example:

<select>
  <option value="0">2002/12</option>
  <option value="1">2003/12</option>
  <option value="2">2004/12</option>
  <option value="3">2005/12</option>
  <option value="4">2006/12</option>
  <option value="5" selected>2007/12</option>
</select>

I know I can do

theSelectTag.findAll('option',attrs={'selected':''})

but that is returning all the options. Is there a way to get all the elements where an attribute exists? Please note, I ask for all, as the site I'm scraping does include the selected attribute for multiple options.

I'm using Python 2.7 and Beautiful Soup 4.1.2

Answer 1

Passing True as the attribute's value will match all elements with that attribute:

>>> from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
>>> soup = BeautifulSoup('''<select>
...   <option value="0">2002/12</option>
...   <option value="1">2003/12</option>
...   <option value="2">2004/12</option>
...   <option value="3">2005/12</option>
...   <option value="4">2006/12</option>
...   <option value="5" selected>2007/12</option>
... </select>''')
>>> soup.find_all('option', selected=True)
    [<option selected="" value="5">2007/12</option>]
>>> soup.find_all('option', {'selected': True})
    [<option selected="" value="5">2007/12</option>]

And with lxml:

>>> from lxml import etree
>>> root = etree.HTML('''<select>
  <option value="0">2002/12</option>
  <option value="1">2003/12</option>
  <option value="2">2004/12</option>
  <option value="3">2005/12</option>
  <option value="4">2006/12</option>
  <option value="5" selected>2007/12</option>
</select>''')
>>> root.xpath('//option[@selected]')
    [<Element option at 0x228b7d0>]