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What does BeautifulSoup's .content do? I am working through crummy.com's tutorial and I don't really understand what .content does. I have looked at the forums and I have not seen any answers. Looking at the code below....
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
import re
doc = ['<html><head><title>Page title</title></head>',
'<body><p id="firstpara" align="center">This is paragraph <b>one</b>.',
'<p id="secondpara" align="blah">This is paragraph <b>two</b>.',
'</html>']
soup = BeautifulSoup(''.join(doc))
print soup.contents[0].contents[0].contents[0].contents[0].name
I would expect the last line of the code to print out 'body' instead of...
File "pe_ratio.py", line 29, in <module>
print soup.contents[0].contents[0].contents[0].contents[0].name
File "C:\Python27\lib\BeautifulSoup.py", line 473, in __getattr__
raise AttributeError, "'%s' object has no attribute '%s'" % (self.__class__.__name__, attr)
AttributeError: 'NavigableString' object has no attribute 'name'
Is .content only concerned with html, head and title? If, so why is that?
Thanks for the help in advance.
202
It just gives you whats inside the tag. Let me demonstrate with an example:
html_doc = """
<html><head><title>The Dormouse's story</title></head>
<p class="title"><b>The Dormouse's story</b></p>
<p class="story">Once upon a time there were three little sisters; and their names were
<a href="http://example.com/elsie" class="sister" id="link1">Elsie</a>,
<a href="http://example.com/lacie" class="sister" id="link2">Lacie</a> and
<a href="http://example.com/tillie" class="sister" id="link3">Tillie</a>;
and they lived at the bottom of a well.</p>
<p class="story">...</p>
"""
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
soup = BeautifulSoup(html_doc)
head = soup.head
print head.contents
The above code gives me a list,[<title>The Dormouse's story</title>], because thats inside the head tag. So calling [0] would give you the first item in the list.
The reason you get an error is because soup.contents[0].contents[0].contents[0].contents[0] returns something with no further tags (therefore no attributes). It returns Page Title from your code, because the first contents[0] gives you the HTML tag, the second one, gives you the head tag. The third one leads to the title tag, and the fourth one gives you the actual content. So, when you call a name on it, it has no tags to give you.
If you want the body printed, you can do the following:
soup = BeautifulSoup(''.join(doc))
print soup.body
If you want body using contents only, then use the following:
soup = BeautifulSoup(''.join(doc))
print soup.contents[0].contents[1].name
You will not get it using [0] as the index, because body is the second element after head.
167
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