Beautiful Soup - parents Property

Method Description

The parents property in BeautifulSoup library retrieves all the parent elements of the said PegeElement in a recursive manner. The type of the value returned by the parents property is a generator, with the help of which we can list out the parents in the down-to-up order.

Syntax

Element.parents

Return value

The parents property returns a generator object.

Example 1

This example uses .parents to travel from an <a> tag buried deep within the document, to the very top of the document. In the following code, we track the parents of the first <p> tag in the example HTML string.

html = """
<html><head><title>TutorialsPoint</title></head>
<body>
<p>Hello World</p>
"""
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

soup = BeautifulSoup(html, 'html.parser')
tag = soup.p
for element in tag.parents:
   print (element.name)

Output

body
html
[document]

Note that the parent to the BeautifulSoup object is [document].

Example 2

In the following example, we see that the <b> tag is enclosed inside a <p> tag. The two div tags above it have an id attribute. We try to print the only those elements having id attribute. The has_attr() method is used for the purpose.

html = """
<div id="outer">
<div id="inner">
<p>Hello<b>World</b></p>
</div>
</div>
"""
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

soup = BeautifulSoup(html, 'html.parser')
tag = soup.b
for parent in tag.parents:
   if parent.has_attr("id"):
      print(parent["id"])

Output

inner
outer
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