Beautiful Soup - Functions Reference

Beautiful Soup Useful Resources

Beautiful Soup - Find Elements by Attributes

Quiz

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.

Using find_all() method

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

Example - Finding tags having input type as text

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

html = """
<html>
   <head>
      <title>TutorialsPoint</title>
   </head>
   <body>
      <h1>TutorialsPoint</h1>
      <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>
"""

soup = BeautifulSoup(html, '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() method

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

Example - Finding first tag having name as marks

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

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>
"""

soup = BeautifulSoup(html, 'html.parser')

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

Output

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

Using select() method

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 - Finding all tags with given type

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

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>
"""

soup = BeautifulSoup(html, '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() method

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

Example - Finding first tag with given filter.

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

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>
"""

soup = BeautifulSoup(html, 'html.parser')
obj = soup.select_one("[name='marks']")
print(obj)

Output

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

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