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How to Search the Parse Tree using BeautifulSoup?
Finding the tag and the HTML tree's content indicates searching the parse tree using BeautifulSoup. There are other ways to accomplish this, but the find() and find_all() methods are the most popular for searching the parse tree. We can use BeautifulSoup to parse the HTML tree with the help of these techniques. One benefit of applying Beautiful Soup is that even when we are moving from another language, it is simple for beginners to learn. It provides excellent, thorough documentation that makes it easier for us to pick things up quickly.
Syntax
The following syntax is used in the examples −
BeautifulSoup()
Beautiful Soup is a built-in method in Python program for extracting data from HTML and XML files. It enables us to search, navigate, and update the structure of data search and the structure of navigate, and update the structure of data in these files.
find()
This is a built-in function in Python that can be used to determine the index of the first occurrence of a substring within the given text.
find_all()
The find_all() is a built-in BeautifulSoup library method in Python that appears for all occurrences of tags that meet the specified condition. It returns a list of all tags that match.
Installation Requirement −
pip install beautifulsoup4
This is the necessary installing command that can be used to run a program based on BeautifulSoup.
Method 1: Searching For The Specific Tag
This program uses two built-in methods- BeautifulSoup() which accepts two parameters namely html_content to set the values as HTML code by using some tag inside it and html.parser which is a tool for processing structured markup. It defines the HTMLParser class, which is used to parse HTML files. It is helpful for web crawling or web scraping.
Example
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup # Storing of HTML Tags html_content = ''' <html> <body> <h1>Title</h1> <p>This is paragraph</p> </body> </html> ''' # Create the BeautifulSoup object soup = BeautifulSoup(html_content, 'html.parser') # Search for the <h1> tag p_tag = soup.find('p') if p_tag: print("Found <p> tag:", p_tag.text) else: print("The <p> tag not found")
Output
Found <h1> tag: This is paragraph
Method 2: Searching for Multiple Tags
The program uses two methods BeautifulSoup() and find_all() which will count to find multiple tags like the p tag or any other tags. The find_all() method returns the list of multiple tags.
Example
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup # Storing of HTML Tags html_content = ''' <html> <body> <h1>Title</h1> <p>Paragraph 1</p> <p>Paragraph 2</p> <h3>Hello World</h3> <h3>Inner World</h3> </body> </html> ''' # Create a BeautifulSoup object soup = BeautifulSoup(html_content, 'html.parser') # Search for all <p> tags h3_tags = soup.find_all('h3') if h3_tags: print("Found", len(h3_tags), "<h3> tags:") for h3 in h3_tags: print(h3.text) else: print("Could not find any <h3> tags")
Output
Found 2 <h3> tags: Hello World Inner World
Method 3: Searching for Tags With Specific Attributes
The program uses two methods BeautifulSoup() and find()[which accepts two parameters- tag_name and attrs={‘id’: ‘id_name’}] that will find the tags with specific attributes.
Example
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup # Storing of HTML tags html_content = ''' <html> <body> <h1 class="title">Title</h1> <p id="para1">Paragraph 1</p> <p id="para2">Paragraph 2</p> </body> </html> ''' # Create a BeautifulSoup object soup = BeautifulSoup(html_content, 'html.parser') # Search for the <p> tag with id="paragraph2" p_tag = soup.find('p', attrs={'id': 'para2'}) if p_tag: print("Found <p> tag with id='para2':", p_tag.text) else: print("Could not find <p> tag with id='para2'")
Output
Found <p> tag with id='para2': Paragraph 2
Conclusion
We discussed the three different ways to solve the problem statement based on Search the Parse Tree using BeautifulSoup. Once the BeautifulSoup object is created, we can use its methods to navigate and extract data from the HTML content. It is commonly used as a tool within other applications or scripts for web scraping and data extraction from HTML and XML files.