- Beautiful Soup Tutorial
- Beautiful Soup - Home
- Beautiful Soup - Overview
- Beautiful Soup - Web Scraping
- Beautiful Soup - Installation
- Beautiful Soup - Souping the Page
- Beautiful Soup - Kinds of objects
- Beautiful Soup - Inspect Data Source
- Beautiful Soup - Scrape HTML Content
- Beautiful Soup - Navigating by Tags
- Beautiful Soup - Find Elements by ID
- Beautiful Soup - Find Elements by Class
- Beautiful Soup - Find Elements by Attribute
- Beautiful Soup - Searching the Tree
- Beautiful Soup - Modifying the Tree
- Beautiful Soup - Parsing a Section of a Document
- Beautiful Soup - Find all Children of an Element
- Beautiful Soup - Find Element using CSS Selectors
- Beautiful Soup - Find all Comments
- Beautiful Soup - Scraping List from HTML
- Beautiful Soup - Scraping Paragraphs from HTML
- BeautifulSoup - Scraping Link from HTML
- Beautiful Soup - Get all HTML Tags
- Beautiful Soup - Get Text Inside Tag
- Beautiful Soup - Find all Headings
- Beautiful Soup - Extract Title Tag
- Beautiful Soup - Extract Email IDs
- Beautiful Soup - Scrape Nested Tags
- Beautiful Soup - Parsing Tables
- Beautiful Soup - Selecting nth Child
- Beautiful Soup - Search by text inside a Tag
- Beautiful Soup - Remove HTML Tags
- Beautiful Soup - Remove all Styles
- Beautiful Soup - Remove all Scripts
- Beautiful Soup - Remove Empty Tags
- Beautiful Soup - Remove Child Elements
- Beautiful Soup - find vs find_all
- Beautiful Soup - Specifying the Parser
- Beautiful Soup - Comparing Objects
- Beautiful Soup - Copying Objects
- Beautiful Soup - Get Tag Position
- Beautiful Soup - Encoding
- Beautiful Soup - Output Formatting
- Beautiful Soup - Pretty Printing
- Beautiful Soup - NavigableString Class
- Beautiful Soup - Convert Object to String
- Beautiful Soup - Convert HTML to Text
- Beautiful Soup - Parsing XML
- Beautiful Soup - Error Handling
- Beautiful Soup - Trouble Shooting
- Beautiful Soup - Porting Old Code
- Beautiful Soup - Functions Reference
- Beautiful Soup - contents Property
- Beautiful Soup - children Property
- Beautiful Soup - string Property
- Beautiful Soup - strings Property
- Beautiful Soup - stripped_strings Property
- Beautiful Soup - descendants Property
- Beautiful Soup - parent Property
- Beautiful Soup - parents Property
- Beautiful Soup - next_sibling Property
- Beautiful Soup - previous_sibling Property
- Beautiful Soup - next_siblings Property
- Beautiful Soup - previous_siblings Property
- Beautiful Soup - next_element Property
- Beautiful Soup - previous_element Property
- Beautiful Soup - next_elements Property
- Beautiful Soup - previous_elements Property
- Beautiful Soup - find Method
- Beautiful Soup - find_all Method
- Beautiful Soup - find_parents Method
- Beautiful Soup - find_parent Method
- Beautiful Soup - find_next_siblings Method
- Beautiful Soup - find_next_sibling Method
- Beautiful Soup - find_previous_siblings Method
- Beautiful Soup - find_previous_sibling Method
- Beautiful Soup - find_all_next Method
- Beautiful Soup - find_next Method
- Beautiful Soup - find_all_previous Method
- Beautiful Soup - find_previous Method
- Beautiful Soup - select Method
- Beautiful Soup - append Method
- Beautiful Soup - extend Method
- Beautiful Soup - NavigableString Method
- Beautiful Soup - new_tag Method
- Beautiful Soup - insert Method
- Beautiful Soup - insert_before Method
- Beautiful Soup - insert_after Method
- Beautiful Soup - clear Method
- Beautiful Soup - extract Method
- Beautiful Soup - decompose Method
- Beautiful Soup - replace_with Method
- Beautiful Soup - wrap Method
- Beautiful Soup - unwrap Method
- Beautiful Soup - smooth Method
- Beautiful Soup - prettify Method
- Beautiful Soup - encode Method
- Beautiful Soup - decode Method
- Beautiful Soup - get_text Method
- Beautiful Soup - diagnose Method
- Beautiful Soup Useful Resources
- Beautiful Soup - Quick Guide
- Beautiful Soup - Useful Resources
- Beautiful Soup - Discussion
Beautiful Soup - Selecting nth Child
HTML is characterized by the hierarchical order of tags. For example, the <html> tag encloses <body> tag, inside which there may be a <div> tag further may have <ul> and <li> elements nested respectively. The findChildren() method and .children property both return a ResultSet (list) of all the child tags directly under an element. By traversing the list, you can obtain the child located at a desired position, nth child.
The code below uses the children property of a <div> tag in the HTML document. Since the return type of children property is a list iterator, we shall retrieve a Python list from it. We also need to remove the whitespaces and line breaks from the iterator. Once done, we can fetch the desired child. Here the child element with index 1 of the <div> tag is displayed.
Example
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup, NavigableString markup = ''' <div id="Languages"> <p>Java</p> <p>Python</p> <p>C++</p> </div> ''' soup = BeautifulSoup(markup, 'html.parser') tag = soup.div children = tag.children childlist = [child for child in children if child not in ['\n', ' ']] print (childlist[1])
Output
<p>Python</p>
To use findChildren() method instead of children property, change the statement to
children = tag.findChildren()
There will be no change in the output.
A more efficient approach toward locating nth child is with the select() method. The select() method uses CSS selectors to obtain required PageElements from the current element.
The Soup and Tag objects support CSS selectors through their .css property, which is an interface to the CSS selector API. The selector implementation is handled by the Soup Sieve package, which gets installed along with bs4 package.
The Soup Sieve package defines different types of CSS selectors, namely simple, compound and complex CSS selectors that are made up of one or more type selectors, ID selectors, class selectors. These selectors are defined in CSS language.
There are pseudo class selectors as well in Soup Sieve. A CSS pseudo-class is a keyword added to a selector that specifies a special state of the selected element(s). We shall use :nth-child pseudo class selector in this example. Since we need to select a child from <div> tag at 2nd position, we shall pass :nthchild(2) to the select_one() method.
Example
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup, NavigableString markup = ''' <div id="Languages"> <p>Java</p> <p>Python</p> <p>C++</p> </div> ''' soup = BeautifulSoup(markup, 'html.parser') tag = soup.div child = tag.select_one(':nth-child(2)') print (child)
Output
<p>Python</p>
We get the same result as with the findChildren() method. Note that the child numbering starts with 1 and not 0 as in case of a Python list.