How to find tags with only certain attributes - BeautifulSoup

Question

How would I, using BeautifulSoup, search for tags containing ONLY the attributes I search for?

For example, I want to find all <td valign="top"> tags.

The following code: raw_card_data = soup.fetch('td', {'valign':re.compile('top')})

gets all of the data I want, but also grabs any <td> tag that has the attribute valign:top

I also tried: raw_card_data = soup.findAll(re.compile('<td valign="top">')) and this returns nothing (probably because of bad regex)

I was wondering if there was a way in BeautifulSoup to say "Find <td> tags whose only attribute is valign:top"

UPDATE FOr example, if an HTML document contained the following <td> tags:

<td valign="top">.....</td><br />
<td width="580" valign="top">.......</td><br />
<td>.....</td><br />

I would want only the first <td> tag (<td width="580" valign="top">) to return

Answer 1

As explained on the BeautifulSoup documentation

You may use this :

soup = BeautifulSoup(html)
results = soup.findAll("td", {"valign" : "top"})

EDIT :

To return tags that have only the valign="top" attribute, you can check for the length of the tag attrs property :

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup

html = '<td valign="top">.....</td>\
        <td width="580" valign="top">.......</td>\
        <td>.....</td>'

soup = BeautifulSoup(html)
results = soup.findAll("td", {"valign" : "top"})

for result in results :
    if len(result.attrs) == 1 :
        print result

That returns :

<td valign="top">.....</td>

Answer 2

You can use lambda functions in findAll as explained in documentation. So that in your case to search for td tag with only valign = "top" use following:

td_tag_list = soup.findAll(
                lambda tag:tag.name == "td" and
                len(tag.attrs) == 1 and
                tag["valign"] == "top")

Answer 3

if you want to only search with attribute name with any value

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import re

soup= BeautifulSoup(html.text,'lxml')
results = soup.findAll("td", {"valign" : re.compile(r".*")})

as per Steve Lorimer better to pass True instead of regex

results = soup.findAll("td", {"valign" : True})