Beautiful Soup - Functions Reference

Beautiful Soup Useful Resources

Beautiful Soup - find() Method

Quiz

Method Description

The find() method in Beautiful Soup looks for the first Element that matches the given criteria in the children of this PageElement and returns it.

Syntax

Soup.find(name, attrs, recursive, string, **kwargs)

Parameters

name − A filter on tag name.

attrs − A dictionary of filters on attribute values.

recursive − If this is True, find() a recursive search will be performed. Otherwise, only the direct children will be considered.

limit − Stop looking after specified number of occurrences have been found.

kwargs − A dictionary of filters on attribute values.

Return value

The find() method returns Tag object or a NavigableString object

Example - Finding an Element by an ID

The following Python code finds the element with its id as nm

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(id = 'nm')
print (obj)

Output

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

Example - Finding First Tag matching given attribute

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

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"/>

Example - Case of no match

If find() can't find anything, it returns None

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('dummy')
print (obj)

Output

None

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