Beautiful Soup findAll doesn't find them all

Clepto picture Clepto · May 1, 2013 · Viewed 74.4k times · Source

I'm trying to parse a website and get some info with BeautifulSoup.findAll but it doesn't find them all.. I'm using python3

the code is this

#!/usr/bin/python3

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
from urllib.request import urlopen

page = urlopen ("http://mangafox.me/directory/")
# print (page.read ())
soup = BeautifulSoup (page.read ())

manga_img = soup.findAll ('a', {'class' : 'manga_img'}, limit=None)

for manga in manga_img:
    print (manga['href'])

it only prints the half of them...

Answer

Martijn Pieters picture Martijn Pieters · May 1, 2013

Different HTML parsers deal differently with broken HTML. That page serves broken HTML, and the lxml parser is not dealing very well with it:

>>> import requests
>>> from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
>>> r = requests.get('http://mangafox.me/directory/')
>>> soup = BeautifulSoup(r.content, 'lxml')
>>> len(soup.find_all('a', class_='manga_img'))
18

The standard library html.parser has less trouble with this specific page:

>>> soup = BeautifulSoup(r.content, 'html.parser')
>>> len(soup.find_all('a', class_='manga_img'))
44

Translating that to your specific code sample using urllib, you would specify the parser thus:

soup = BeautifulSoup(page, 'html.parser')  # BeatifulSoup can do the reading