Beautiful Soup - Find Elements by Attribute

Both find() and find_all() methods are meant to find one or all the tags in the document as per the arguments passed to these methods. You can pass attrs parameter to these functions. The value of attrs must be a dictionary with one or more tag attributes and their values.

For the purpose of checking the behaviour of these methods, we shall use the following HTML document (index.html)

<html>
   <head>
      <title>TutorialsPoint</title>
   </head>
   <body>
      <form>
         <input type = 'text' id = 'nm' name = 'name'>
         <input type = 'text' id = 'age' name = 'age'>
         <input type = 'text' id = 'marks' name = 'marks'>
      </form>
   </body>
</html>

Using find_all()

The following program returns a list of all the tags having input type="text" attribute.

Example

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

fp = open("index.html")
soup = BeautifulSoup(fp, 'html.parser')

obj = soup.find_all(attrs={"type":'text'})
print (obj)

Output

[<input id="nm" name="name" type="text"/>, <input id="age" name="age" type="text"/>, <input id="marks" name="marks" type="text"/>]

Using find()

The find() method returns the first tag in the parsed document that has the given attributes.

obj = soup.find(attrs={"name":'marks'})

Using select()

The select() method can be called by passing the attributes to be compared against. The attributes must be put in a list object. It returns a list of all tags that have the given attribute.

In the following code, the select() method returns all the tags with type attribute.

Example

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

fp = open("index.html")
soup = BeautifulSoup(fp, 'html.parser')

obj = soup.select("[type]")
print (obj)

Output

[<input id="nm" name="name" type="text"/>, <input id="age" name="age" type="text"/>, <input id="marks" name="marks" type="text"/>]

Using select_one()

The select_one() is method is similar, except that it returns the first tag satisfying the given filter.

obj = soup.select_one("[name='marks']")

Output

<input id="marks" name="marks" type="text"/>
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