BeautifulSoup webscraping find_all( ): finding exact match
I'm using Python and BeautifulSoup for web scraping.
Lets say I have the following html code to scrape:
<body>
<div class="product">Product 1</div>
<div class="product">Product 2</div>
<div class="product special">Product 3</div>
<div class="product special">Product 4</div>
</body>
Using BeautifulSoup, I want to find ONLY the products with the attribute class="product" (only Product 1 and 2), not the 'special' products
If I do the following:
result = soup.find_all('div', {'class': 'product'})
the result includes ALL the products (1,2,3, and 4).
What should I do to find products whose class EXACTLY matches 'product'??
The Code I ran:
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import re
text = """
<body>
<div class="product">Product 1</div>
<div class="product">Product 2</div>
<div class="product special">Product 3</div>
<div class="product special">Product 4</div>
</body>"""
soup = BeautifulSoup(text)
result = soup.findAll(attrs={'class': re.compile(r"^product$")})
print result
Output:
[<div class="product">Product 1</div>, <div class="product">Product 2</div>, <div class="product special">Product 3</div>, <div class="product special">Product 4</div>]
Answer
In BeautifulSoup 4, the class attribute (and several other attributes, such as accesskey and the headers attribute on table cell elements) is treated as a set; you match against individual elements listed in the attribute. This follows the HTML standard.
As such, you cannot limit the search to just one class.
You'll have to use a custom function here to match against the class instead:
result = soup.find_all(lambda tag: tag.name == 'div' and
tag.get('class') == ['product'])
I used a lambda to create an anonymous function; each tag is matched on name (must be 'div'), and the class attribute must be exactly equal to the list ['product']; e.g. have just the one value.
Demo:
>>> from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
>>> text = """
... <body>
... <div class="product">Product 1</div>
... <div class="product">Product 2</div>
... <div class="product special">Product 3</div>
... <div class="product special">Product 4</div>
... </body>"""
>>> soup = BeautifulSoup(text)
>>> soup.find_all(lambda tag: tag.name == 'div' and tag.get('class') == ['product'])
[<div class="product">Product 1</div>, <div class="product">Product 2</div>]
For completeness sake, here are all such set attributes, from the BeautifulSoup source code:
# The HTML standard defines these attributes as containing a
# space-separated list of values, not a single value. That is,
# class="foo bar" means that the 'class' attribute has two values,
# 'foo' and 'bar', not the single value 'foo bar'. When we
# encounter one of these attributes, we will parse its value into
# a list of values if possible. Upon output, the list will be
# converted back into a string.
cdata_list_attributes = {
"*" : ['class', 'accesskey', 'dropzone'],
"a" : ['rel', 'rev'],
"link" : ['rel', 'rev'],
"td" : ["headers"],
"th" : ["headers"],
"td" : ["headers"],
"form" : ["accept-charset"],
"object" : ["archive"],
# These are HTML5 specific, as are *.accesskey and *.dropzone above.
"area" : ["rel"],
"icon" : ["sizes"],
"iframe" : ["sandbox"],
"output" : ["for"],
}