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BeautifulSoup find by class

BeautifulSoup find by class

Introduction to BeautifulSoup find by class

BeautifulSoup find by class package that extracts information from HTML and XML files. It integrates with our preferred parser to offer fluent navigation, searching, and modification of the parse tree. As a result, it frequently saves programmers hours or even days. BeautifulSoup extracts meaningful information from web pages, HTML, and XML files to get the most out of publicly available data.

Overview of BeautifulSoup find by class

  • Web scraping is quite valuable. Data from various sources, including websites, are required by everyone. We are using the BeautifulSoup library to parse HTML in this tutorial. BeautifulSoup package, extracting vital data much more straightforward.
  • BeautifulSoup is a Python program that can be quickly installed on our computer using python’s pip utility.
  • BeautifulSoup package aids in parsing and extracting information from HTML documents. It allows us to navigate, search, and extract data from an HTML file.
  • Tags make up HTML. It keeps all of its data among all of that mess is the information we require. If we discover the correct titles, we can retrieve what we need.
  • The search and find all methods in BeautifulSoup are used. The locate method finds the first tag with the required name and produces a bs4 element object.
  • The find all method, on the other hand, specified tag name and returned a list of bs4 element tags result set because all of the entries in the list are of the type bs4.element.
  • Scraping data from websites is known as web data extraction. Several Python libraries are available, ranging from the basic Beautiful Soup to the more complex Scrapy, which includes scrawling and other capabilities. Because we only require simple web scraping to utilize BS4.

How to find by class in BeautifulSoup?

BeautifulSoup allows us to search for an HTML element by its class. The select method can search by class, with the class name as an input. This method applies a CSS Selector to the parsed page and returns all elements that match the criteria.

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Below steps shows how to find by class in BeautifulSoup as follows:

1. In this step, we are installing the bs4 package by using the pip command. Bs4 package is used to import all the BeautifulSoup modules. In the below example, we have already installed the bs4 package in our system, so it will show that the requirement is already satisfied, then we do not need to do anything.

Code:


# pip install bs4

Output:

BeautifulSoup find by class 1

2. After installing the bs4 package in this step, we create the HTML page. We have created the below HTML page to find BeautifulSoup by class as follows.

Code:

<html>
<head>
<base href = 'http://example.com/' />
<title>Example website</title>
</head>
<body>
<div id = 'images'>
<a href = 'image1.html'>Image 1 <br /><img src = 'image1_thumb.jpg' /></a>
<a href = 'image2.html'>Image 2 <br /><img src = 'image2_thumb.jpg' /></a>
<a href = 'image3.html'>Image 3 <br /><img src = 'image3_thumb.jpg' /></a>
<a href = 'image4.html'>Image 4 <br /><img src = 'image4_thumb.jpg' /></a>
<a href = 'image5.html'>Image 5 <br /><img src = 'image5_thumb.jpg' /></a>
</div>
</body>
</html>

Output:

BeautifulSoup find by class 2

3. After creating the HTML code in this step, we open the python shell by using the python3 command.

Code:


python3

Output:

BeautifulSoup find by class 3

4. After opening the python shell, we import the beautifulsoup and requests modules. We are importing the beautifulsoup module using the bs4 package as follows.

Code:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests

Output:

BeautifulSoup find by class 4

5. After importing the beautifulsoup, os, and requests modules in this step, we are checking how to find beautifulsoup by class as follows.

Code:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests
py_url = "http://doc.scrapy.org/en/latest/_static/selectors-sample1.html"
py_con = requests.get (py_url)
py_soup = BeautifulSoup (py_con.text, 'html.parser')
print (py_soup.select ('title'))

Output:

os and requests modules

Examples of BeautifulSoup find by class

The below example shows BeautifulSoup by category by using the find_all method.

Example #1

Code:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests
py_url = "http://doc.scrapy.org/en/latest/_static/selectors-sample1.html"
py_con = requests.get (py_url)
py_soup = BeautifulSoup (py_con.text, 'html.parser')
print (py_soup.find_all ('image_thumb.jpg'))

Output:

find_all method

  • In the above example, we can see that we have imported the bs4 and requests module. After importing the module, we use the HTML page URL we created.
  • After using the URL, we have to access this URL by using the requests and get method. Then we print the title of an HTML web page using the beautifulsoup find method.

Example #2

The below example shows that beautifulsoup by class by using the select method.

Code:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests
py_url = "http://doc.scrapy.org/en/latest/_static/selectors-sample1.html"
py_con = requests.get (py_url)
py_soup = BeautifulSoup (py_con.text, 'html.parser')
print (py_soup.find_all ('title'))

Output:

using select method

BeautifulSoup find by class Elements

  • The webpage we wish to scrape will result in HTML content being returned. We can achieve this with Python’s Request library.
  • Using BeautifulSoup, fetch and parse the data, and save it in a data structure like a Dict or List.
  • They are examining HTML tags and their attributes, including class and attributes. Data can be saved in various file formats, including CSV, XLSX, and JSON.
  • Beautiful soup produces a parse tree from an HTML or XML document that has been parsed. Next, we will generate a Beautiful Soup object, commonly referred to as soup, using the previously obtained web page.
  • We may use python’s built-in HTML.parser to create the HTML page. The HTML page is represented as a layered data structure by the object.
  • Beautiful soup only enables parsing the answer into HTML/XML and does not support making server requests; hence we need Requests.
  • BeautifulSoup is a popular Python module for scraping data from the internet. Beautifulsoup find by class is very important and valuable in python.

The below example shows beautifulsoup find by class elements as follows.

Code:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests
py_url = "http://doc.scrapy.org/en/latest/_static/selectors-sample1.html"
py_con = requests.get (py_url)
py_soup = BeautifulSoup (py_con.text, 'html.parser')
print (py_soup.find ('title'))

Output:

BeautifulSoup find by class 8

Conclusion

BeautifulSoup is a Python program that can be quickly installed on our computer using python’s pip utility. Beautifulsoup find by class package that extracts information from HTML and XML files. It integrates with our preferred parser to offer fluent navigation, searching, and modification of the parse tree.

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