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BeautifulSoup Find

BeautifulSoup Find

Introduction to BeautifulSoup Find

BeautifulSoup find is a python package for parsing HTML and XML files and extracting data. An XML passed to a BeautifulSoup function Object. BeautifulSoup has parsed the document and produces data structure in memory corresponding to it. Find and find all are the most commonly used methods for locating anything on a webpage. BeautifulSoup find is handy and important in python.

What is BeautifulSoup Find?

  • When we feed BeautifulSoup a well-formed document, the processed data structure looks exactly like the original. This is because beautifulSoup find employs heuristics to develop a viable data structure.
  • BeautifulSoup uses a class named UnicodeDammit to receive and convert them to Unicode regardless of the encoding. We can use UnicodeDammit by itself if we need to perform documents of others (without needing BeautifulSoup to parse them). The Universal Feed Parser’s code largely influences it.
  • BeautifulSoup is a widely used Python package for navigating, searching and extracting data from HTML or XML webpages.

How to find BeautifulSoup by Class?

The find method returns an object of type bs4 after locating the first tag with the supplied id or name. BeautifulSoup has a lot of ways for searching through a parse tree. Find and find all are two of the most commonly used techniques.

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We have a variety of filters that we are passing into this method, and it’s essential to understand them because they’re used often throughout the search API. These filters can be applied to tags based on their names, attributes, string text, or combination.

A string is one of the most basic types of filter. BeautifulSoup will do a match on a string if we pass it to the search method. We can search for all tags that begin with a specific string or tag.

The below steps show how to find BeautifulSoup by class as follows.

  • In this step, we are installing the bs4 package by using the pip command. Bs4 box is used to import all the BeautifulSoup modules.
pip install bs4

find BeautifulSoup by class 1

  • After installing the bs4 package in this step, we create the HTML page. We have made 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>

find BeautifulSoup by class 2

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

find BeautifulSoup by class 3

  • After opening the python shell, we import the BeautifulSoup, os, and requests modules. We are importing the BeautifulSoup module using the bs4 package as follows.
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import os, requests

using bs4 package

To use BeautifulSoup find, we need to import the module of bs4; without importing the bs4 module, we cannot use the BeautifulSoup module in our code.

  • After importing the BeautifulSoup, os, and requests modules in this step, we check how to find BeautifulSoup by class.

Code:

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

find BeautifulSoup by class 5

In the above example, we can see that first, we have imported the bs4, os, and requests modules. Then, after importing the module, we use the HTML page URL we created.

After using the URL, we accessed this URL using the requests and get method. After accessing the URL, we use BeautifulSoup by using the html.parser. Then we print the title of the HTML web page by using the BeautifulSoup find method.

BeautifulSoup Find all class

  • BeautifulSoup (bs4) is a Python module that extracts information from HTML files. This module is not included with python. We are executing the “pip install bs4” command in the terminal to install it.
  • Queries make it very simple to send HTTP/1.1 requests. Unfortunately, the request module is also not included with python. We are executing the “pip install request” command in the terminal to install it.

The below example shows find all classes by URL are 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 (url)
py_soup = BeautifulSoup (py_con.text, 'html.parser')
print (py_soup.find_all ('title'))

By URL

  • In the above example, we can see that we have imported the bs4 and requests module. Then we are using the HTML page URL.
  • After using the URL, we have access to the URL by using the requests and get method. Then we are using BeautifulSoup by using the html.parser.
  • To print the data from the HTML web page, we are using the find_all method.

BeautifulSoup Find Searching

  • The find method is discovered on the page, and the find function returns the result. It’s only used to get the first tag of an incoming HTML object that meets the requirement.
  • As a result, we can only print the first search. After scanning the entire document, find all is used to return all matches.
  • We created the HTML document in the example below when writing the BeautifulSoup code.

The below example shows searching the class using a given HTML document.

Code:

py_html = """<html><head><title>BeautifulSoup find</title></head>
<body>
<p class="title"><b>BeautifulSoup</b></p>
<p class="body">Example of how to find BeautifulSoup all class.
</body>
"""
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
py_soup = BeautifulSoup ( py_html , 'html.parser')
py_soup.find ( class_ = "body" )

Searching the class

Conclusion

BeautifulSoup is a widely used Python package for navigating, searching and extracting data from HTML or XML webpages. BeautifulSoup find is a python package for parsing HTML and XML files and extracting data. The find method returns the object of type bs4 after locating the first tag with the supplied id or name.

Recommended Articles

This is a guide to BeautifulSoup Find. Here we also discuss the definition and how to find BeautifulSoup by class, along with an example. You may also have a look at the following articles to learn more –

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