Get data from the meta tags using BeautifulSoup

Question

I am trying to read the description from the meta tag and this is what I used

soup.findAll(name="description")

but it does not work, however, the code below works just fine

soup.findAll(align="center")

How do I read the description from the meta tag in the head of a document?

Answer 1

Yep, name can't be used in keyword-argument form to designate an attribute named name because the name name is already used by BeautifulSoup itself. So use instead:

soup.findAll(attrs={"name":"description"})

That's what the attrs argument is for: passing as a dict those attribute constraints for which you can't use keyword-argument form because their names are Python keyword or otherwise taken by BeautifulSoup itself!