Beautiful Soup - previous_siblings Property

Method Description

The HTML tags appearing at the same indentation level are called siblings. The previous_siblings property in Beautiful Soup returns returns a generator object used to iterate over all the tags and strings before the current tag, under the same parent. This gives he similar output as find_previous_siblings() method.

Syntax

element.previous_siblings

Return type

The previous_siblings property returns a generator of sibling PageElements.

Example 1

The following example parses the given HTML string that has a few tags embedded inside the outer <p> tag. The previous siblings of the <u> tag are fetched with the help of previous_siblings property.

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
soup = BeautifulSoup("<p><b>Excellent</b><i>Python</i><u>Tutorial</u></p>", 'html.parser')

tag1 = soup.u
print ("previous siblings:")
for tag in tag1.previous_siblings:
   print (tag)

Output

previous siblings:
<i>Python</i>
<b>Excellent</b>

Example 2

In the index.html file used in the following example, there are three input elements in the HTML form. We find out what are the sibling tags previous to the one with id set as marks, and under the <form> tag.

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

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

tag = soup.find('input', {'id':'marks'})
sibs = tag.previous_siblings
print ("previous siblings:")
for sib in sibs:
   print (sib)

Output

previous siblings:

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

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

Example 3

The top level <html> tag always has two sibling tags - head and body. Hence, the <body> tag has only one previous sibling i.e. head, as the following code shows −

html = '''
<html>
   <head>
      <title>Hello</title>
   </head>
   <body>
      <p>Excellent</p><p>Python</p><p>Tutorial</p>
   </body>
   </head>
'''
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

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

tags = soup.body.previous_siblings
print ("previous siblings:")
for tag in tags:
   print (tag)

Output

previous siblings:

<head>
<title>Hello</title>
</head>
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