Get text with BeautifulSoup CSS Selector

Question

Example HTML

<h2 id="name">
    ABC
    <span class="numbers">123</span>
    <span class="lower">abc</span>
</h2>

I can get the numbers with something like:

soup.select('#name > span.numbers')[0].text

How do I get the text ABC using BeautifulSoup and the select function?

What about in this case?

<div id="name">
    <div id="numbers">123</div> 
    ABC
</div>

Answer 1

In the first case, get the previous sibling:

soup.select_one('#name > span.numbers').previous_sibling

In the second case, get the next sibling:

soup.select_one('#name > #numbers').next_sibling

Note that I assume that it is intentional that here you have the numbers as an id value and the tag is div instead of span. Hence, I've adjusted the CSS selector.

---

To cover both cases, you can go to the parent of the tag and find the non-empty text node in a non-recursive mode:

parent = soup.select_one('#name > .numbers,#numbers').parent
print(parent.find(text=lambda text: text and text.strip(), recursive=False).strip())

Note the change in the selector - we are asking to match either numbers id or numbers class.

Though, I have a feeling that this universal solution would not be quite reliable because, for starters, I don't know what your real inputs could be.