How to find all divs who's class starts with a string in BeautifulSoup?

Question

In BeautifulSoup, if I want to find all div's where whose class is span3, I'd just do:

result = soup.findAll("div",{"class":"span3"}) 

However, in my case, I want to find all div's whose class starts with span3, therefore, BeautifulSoup should find:

<div id="span3 span49"> <div id="span3 span39"> 

And so on...

How do I achieve what I want? I am familiar with regular expressions; however I do not know how to implement them to beautiful soup nor did I find any help by going through BeautifulSoup's documentation.

Answer 1

Well, these are id attributes you are showing:

<div id="span3 span49"> <div id="span3 span39"> 

In this case, you can use:

soup.find_all("div", id=lambda value: value and value.startswith("span3")) 

Or:

soup.find_all("div", id=re.compile("^span3")) 

---

If this was just a typo, and you actually have class attributes start with span3, and your really need to check the class to start with span3, you can use the "starts-with" CSS selector:

soup.select("div[class^=span3]") 

This is because you cannot check the class attribute the same way you checked the id attribute because class is special, it is a multi-valued attribute.

Answer 2

This works too:

soup.select("div[class*=span3]") # with *= means: contains