Beautiful Soup - contents Property

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Method Description

The contents property is available with the Soup object as well as Tag object. It returns a list everything that is contained inside the object, all the immediate child elements and text nodes (i.e. Navigable String).

Syntax

Tag.contents

Return value

The contents property returns a list of child elements and strings in the Tag/Soup object,.

Example 1

Contents of a tag object −

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

markup = '''
   <div id="Languages">
      <p>Java</p>
      <p>Python</p>
      <p>C++</p>
   </div>
'''
soup = BeautifulSoup(markup, 'html.parser')

tag = soup.div
print (tag.contents)

Output

['\n', <p>Java</p>, '\n', <p>Python</p>, '\n', <p>C++</p>, '\n']

Example 2

Contents of the entire document −

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup, NavigableString

markup = '''
   <div id="Languages">
      <p>Java</p> <p>Python</p> <p>C++</p>
   </div>
'''
soup = BeautifulSoup(markup, 'html.parser')

print (soup.contents)

Output

['\n', <div id="Languages">
<p>Java</p> <p>Python</p> <p>C++</p>
</div>, '\n']

Example 3

Note that a NavigableString object doesn't have contents property. It throws AttributeError if we try to access the same.

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.p
s=tag.contents[0]
print (s.contents)

Output

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\Users\user\BeautifulSoup\2.py", line 11, in <module>
    print (s.contents)
           ^^^^^^^^^^
  File "C:\Users\user\BeautifulSoup\Lib\site-packages\bs4\element.py", line 984, in __getattr__
    raise AttributeError(
AttributeError: 'NavigableString' object has no attribute 'contents'