How can I select every nth child in BeautifulSoup?

Question

In my table below I have scraped Items 1-4 and stored them in a variable called headings.

I would also like to select Values 1-4 and store them in a variable called columns, is there anyway to select every second . Something like

columns = boxinfo.find_all("td").nthChild(2)

Table structure I am scraping from

<div class="box1">

<table class="table1">

<tr><td class="label">Item1</td><td>Value1</td></tr>

<tr><td class="label">Item2</td><td>Value2</td></tr>

<tr><td class="label">Item3</td><td>Value3</td></tr>

<tr><td class="label">Item4</td><td>Value4</td></tr>

</table>

</div>

Code

#Find our information
boxinfo = soup.find("div", {"id": "box1"})
headings = boxinfo.find_all("td", {"class": "label"})
columns = boxinfo.find_all("td").nthChild(2) #This does not work :(

Answer 1

If you are trying to extract all of the values, then you would let BeautifulSoup return all of the items and Python can then filter the values you want. For example:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

html = """<div class="box1">
<table class="table1">
<tr><td class="label">Item1</td><td>Value1</td></tr>
<tr><td class="label">Item2</td><td>Value2</td></tr>
<tr><td class="label">Item3</td><td>Value3</td></tr>
<tr><td class="label">Item4</td><td>Value4</td></tr>
</table>
</div>"""

soup = BeautifulSoup(html, "html.parser")
div = soup.find("div", class_="box1")
values = []

for tr in div.find_all('tr'):
    values.append(tr.find_all("td")[1].text)

print(values)

Giving you a list of values:

['Value1', 'Value2', 'Value3', 'Value4']

Or if you want a list of containing all of the data as columns:

soup = BeautifulSoup(html, "html.parser")
div = soup.find("div", class_="box1")
columns = []

for tr in div.find_all('tr'):
    columns.append([td.text for td in tr.find_all("td")])

columns = list(zip(*columns))    

print(columns)
print(columns[1])  # display the 2nd column

Giving you:

[('Item1', 'Item2', 'Item3', 'Item4'), ('Value1', 'Value2', 'Value3', 'Value4')]
('Value1', 'Value2', 'Value3', 'Value4')

list(zip(*columns)) is a way of transposing a list of rows into a list of columns.