What's the equivalent of '*' for Beautifulsoup - find_all?

Question

I am trying to get all <tr class="**colour blue** attr1 attr2"> from a page.

The attrs are different each time, and some of the other sibling <tr>s have colour red, colour pink etc. classes.

So I'm looking for any other characters after colour blue in class to be included in the result. I've tried using *, but it didn't work:

soup.find_all('tr', {'class': 'colour blue*'})

Thank you

Answer 1

You can use commonly-used CSS Selectors with beautiful soup:

>>> soup = BeautifulSoup('''
...     <tr class="colour blue attr1 attr2"></tr>
...     <tr class="colour red attr1 attr2"></tr>
...     <tr class="unwanted attr1 attr2"></tr>
...     <tr class="colour blue attr3"></tr>
...     <tr class="another attr1 attr2"></tr>
... ''')
>>> soup.select('tr.colour.blue')
[<tr class="colour blue attr1 attr2"></tr>, <tr class="colour blue attr3"></tr>]

tr.colours.blue selector will match tr as long as it has colours and blue class attributes.

Answer 2

Use regex filter:

import re

soup.find_all('tr', class_=re.compile(r'colour blue.+'))

• In regex, it uses re.search() to find the string.

• . means match any character except the newline.

• + means match . more than one time.