Beautiful Soup: get contents of search result tag

Question

Trying to get the contents of this type of html snippet using beautiful soup (it is a "tag" object).

<span class="font5"> arrives at this calculation from the Torah’s report that the deluge (rains) began on the 17<sup>th</sup> day of the second month </span>

I've tried:

soup.contents.find_all('span')
soup.find_all('span')
soup.find_all(re.compile("font[0-9]+"))
soup.string
soup.child

And none of these seem to be working. What can I do?

Are you saying `soup.find_all('span')` finds nothing, too much or finds some but not including what you want? — Padraic Cunningham, Oct 11 '16 at 01:21

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 11 '16 at 00:14

2

soup.find_all('span') does work; returns all span tags.

If you want to get span tag with font<N> class, specify the pattern as a keyword argument class_:

soup.find_all('span', class_=re.compile('font[0-9]+'))

answered Oct 11 '16 at 00:14

falsetru

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both of these return [], no contents... Please note that this is a tag object, not a soup object. – Ester Lin Oct 11 '16 at 14:26
@EsterLin, Could you provide the minimal working code that reproduce your problem? – falsetru Oct 11 '16 at 14:46

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 11 '16 at 01:21

0

If starting with font is unique enough you can use also use a css selector looking for the class starting with font:

soup.select("span[class^=font]")

answered Oct 11 '16 at 01:21

Padraic Cunningham

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score 0 · Answer 3 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:16

0

print ''.join(soup.findAll(text=True))

(answered here)

edited May 23 '17 at 12:16

Community

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answered Oct 11 '16 at 14:52

Ester Lin

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Beautiful Soup: get contents of search result tag

3 Answers3