Using beautifulsoup to extract text between line breaks (e.g. <br /> tags)

Question

I have the following HTML that is within a larger document

<br />
Important Text 1
<br />
<br />
Not Important Text
<br />
Important Text 2
<br />
Important Text 3
<br />
<br />
Non Important Text
<br />
Important Text 4
<br />

I'm currently using BeautifulSoup to obtain other elements within the HTML, but I have not been able to find a way to get the important lines of text between <br /> tags. I can isolate and navigate to each of the <br /> elements, but can't find a way to get the text in between. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Answer 1

If you just want any text which is between two <br /> tags, you could do something like the following:

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup, NavigableString, Tag

input = '''<br />
Important Text 1
<br />
<br />
Not Important Text
<br />
Important Text 2
<br />
Important Text 3
<br />
<br />
Non Important Text
<br />
Important Text 4
<br />'''

soup = BeautifulSoup(input)

for br in soup.findAll('br'):
    next_s = br.nextSibling
    if not (next_s and isinstance(next_s,NavigableString)):
        continue
    next2_s = next_s.nextSibling
    if next2_s and isinstance(next2_s,Tag) and next2_s.name == 'br':
        text = str(next_s).strip()
        if text:
            print "Found:", next_s

But perhaps I misunderstand your question? Your description of the problem doesn't seem to match up with the "important" / "non important" in your example data, so I've gone with the description ;)

Answer 2

So, for test purposes, let's assume that this chunk of HTML is inside a span tag:

x = """<span><br />
Important Text 1
<br />
<br />
Not Important Text
<br />
Important Text 2
<br />
Important Text 3
<br />
<br />
Non Important Text
<br />
Important Text 4
<br /></span>"""

Now I'm going to parse it and find my span tag:

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
y = soup.find('span')

If you iterate over the generator in y.childGenerator(), you will get both the br's and the text:

In [4]: for a in y.childGenerator(): print type(a), str(a)
   ....: 
<type 'instance'> <br />
<class 'BeautifulSoup.NavigableString'> 
Important Text 1

<type 'instance'> <br />
<class 'BeautifulSoup.NavigableString'> 

<type 'instance'> <br />
<class 'BeautifulSoup.NavigableString'> 
Not Important Text

<type 'instance'> <br />
<class 'BeautifulSoup.NavigableString'> 
Important Text 2

<type 'instance'> <br />
<class 'BeautifulSoup.NavigableString'> 
Important Text 3

<type 'instance'> <br />
<class 'BeautifulSoup.NavigableString'> 

<type 'instance'> <br />
<class 'BeautifulSoup.NavigableString'> 
Non Important Text

<type 'instance'> <br />
<class 'BeautifulSoup.NavigableString'> 
Important Text 4

<type 'instance'> <br />