Menu
I am learning python and beautifulsoup, and saw this code online:
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup, SoupStrainer
import re
html = ['<html><body><p align="center"><b><font size="2">Table 1</font></b><table><tr><td>1. row 1, cell 1</td><td>1. row 1, cell 2</td></tr><tr><td>1. row 2, cell 1</td><td>1. row 2, cell 2</td></tr></table><p align="center"><b><font size="2">Table 2</font></b><table><tr><td>2. row 1, cell 1</td><td>2. row 1, cell 2</td></tr><tr><td>2. row 2, cell 1</td><td>2. row 2, cell 2</td></tr></table></html>']
soup = BeautifulSoup(''.join(html))
searchtext = re.compile(r'Table\s+1',re.IGNORECASE)
foundtext = soup.find('p',text=searchtext) # Find the first <p> tag with the search text
table = foundtext.findNext('table') # Find the first <table> tag that follows it
rows = table.findAll('tr')
for tr in rows:
cols = tr.findAll('td')
for td in cols:
try:
text = ''.join(td.find(text=True))
except Exception:
text = ""
print text+"|",
print
while everything else is clear, i could not understand how the join is working.
text = ''.join(td.find(text=True))
I tried searching the BS documentation for join, but i couldn't find anything and couldn't really find help online as well on how join is used in BS.
Please let me know how that line works. thanks!
PS: the above code is from another stackoverflow page, its not my homework :) How can I find a table after a text string using BeautifulSoup in Python?
442
asked Dec 04 '25 12:12
''.join() is a python function, not anything BS specific. It let's you join a sequence with the string as a joining value:
>>> '-'.join(map(str, range(3)))
'0-1-2'
>>> ' and '.join(('bangers', 'mash'))
'bangers and mash'
'' is simply the empty string, and makes joining a whole set of strings together into one large one easier:
>>> ''.join(('5', '4', 'apple', 'pie'))
'54applepie'
In the specific case of your example, the statement finds all text contained in the <td> element, including any contained HTML elements such as <b> or <i> or <a href=""> and puts them all together into one long string. So td.find(text=True) finds a sequence of python strings, and ''.join() then joins those together into one long string.
96
If you love us? You can donate to us via Paypal or buy me a coffee so we can maintain and grow! Thank you!
Donate Us With
