Find next siblings until a certain one using beautifulsoup

user1550725 picture user1550725 · Jul 25, 2012 · Viewed 20.1k times · Source

The webpage is something like this:

<h2>section1</h2>
<p>article</p>
<p>article</p>
<p>article</p>

<h2>section2</h2>
<p>article</p>
<p>article</p>
<p>article</p>

How can I find each section with articles within them? That is, after finding h2, find nextsiblings

until the next h2.

If the webpage were like: (which is normally the case)

<div>
<h2>section1</h2>
<p>article</p>
<p>article</p>
<p>article</p>
</div>

<div>
<h2>section2</h2>
<p>article</p>
<p>article</p>
<p>article</p>
</div>

I can write codes like:

for section in soup.findAll('div'):
...
    for post in section.findAll('p')

But what should I do with the first webpage if I want to get the same result?

Answer

Zubair Afzal picture Zubair Afzal · Jul 25, 2012

I think you can do something like this:

for section in soup.findAll('h2'):
    nextNode = section
    while True:
        nextNode = nextNode.nextSibling
        try:
            tag_name = nextNode.name
        except AttributeError:
            tag_name = ""
        if tag_name == "p":
            print nextNode.string
        else:
            print "*****"
            break

Given:

<h2>section1</h2>
<p>article1</p>
<p>article2</p>
<p>article3</p>

<h2>section2</h2>
<p>article4</p>
<p>article5</p>
<p>article6</p>

Output:

article1
article2
article3
*****
article4
article5
article6
*****