BeautifulSoup - Cheat Sheet

BeautifulSoup - cheat sheet

• parse HTML by default, can parse XML

Modules to Import:

1. BeautifulSoup
2. CData
3. ProcessingInstruction
4. Declaration
5. DocType

Basic Commands:

import urllib2
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

# use the line below to down load a webpage
html = urllib2.urlopen('web address').read()

soup = BeautifulSoup(open(doc.html))

soup.prettify() => read html

soup.get_text() => all text

soup.get_text(‘|’, strip=True) => all text as unicode, separate tags with |, remove line breaks

Search

.find()

• ('tag', {'attr' : 'value'})

.find_all() 

• string
• string, string
• attr = ‘’text”
• attrs={"data-foo": "value"}
• regex
• list
• true => all tags

----

import re

for tag in soup.find_all(re.compile("t")):

  print(tag.name)

----

def has_class_but_no_id(tag): 

  return tag.has_attr('class') and not tag.has_attr('id’)

soup.find_all(has_class_but_no_id)

----

Navigation

.a_tag.b_tag => get first b_tag in a_tag

.contents => list

.strings => text from the doc

.stripped_strings => text w/o line breaks

.children

.parent

.next_element => different then children

.previous_element

.next_sibling

.previous_sibling

Interables

.decendents

.parents

.next_elements

.previous_elements

.next_siblings

.previous_siblings

BeautifulSoup Objects

Main

1. Tag
2. NavigableString
3. BeautifulSoup
4. Comment

Lesser - all subclass NavigableString

1. CData
2. ProcessingInstruction
3. Declaration
4. DocType

Tag Object

.tag => first tag

.tag.name => tag

.tag.string => text

.tag.get(‘attr’) => use if you don’t know if tag is defined

.tag attr are in a dictionary

• multivalued tag attributes => list
• multivalued tag attributes - class, rev, accept-charset, headers, accesskey
• ‘id’ is not multivalued => string
• you can change tag attributes 

NavigableString Object

• tag.string => text within a string
• tag.string.replace("any_text”)
• use outside of BeautifulSoup by converting to unicode
• unicode(tag.string)
• supports all navigation except .contents .string .find()

BeautifulSoup Object

• whole document
• soup.name => u’[document]’
• supports most navigation

Comment Object

• NavigableString subclass
• <!— text -->
• display with special formatting when prettified

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