How to get HTML from a beautiful soup object

Detailed breakdown

Let's dive deeper into the nuts and bolts of getting HTML content from BeautifulSoup.

Extracting tags and/or text

To fetch just the text or certain tags only, the below methods come in handy:

# Grabbing text without tags
print(soup.get_text())

# Grabbing a particular tag
print(soup.find('span')) # Who doesn't love some span in their soup?
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Knowing your output

Keep in mind that these methods render different outputs:

• soup.prettify() adds newlines and indents for clear structure. It's the neater twin.
• str(soup) gives you the HTML minus any additional formatting. It's the less fussy twin.

Dealing with special characters

Ensure the correct encoding when confronting unique characters:

# Encoding the output to UTF-8
print(soup.prettify().encode('utf-8')) # Going international
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Tips and tricks

Traversing the HTML tree

Use .contents or .children to navigate through the HTML tree:

# Direct children of the soup object
print(soup.contents)

# All children within the soup object, recursively
for child in soup.children:
    print(child) # Who knew soup could have offspring?
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Obtaining attributes

Fetch attributes like id, class, or data-attributes using dictionary-like syntax:

# Access 'id' of the first div
print(soup.find('div')['id']) # Seeking ID for a div in soup? Sure!
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Handling incomplete tags

Sometimes, HTML tags might be incomplete or missing. BeautifulSoup gracefully handles these situations:

# Parsing incomplete HTML
soup = BeautifulSoup("<div><p>Missing closing tags", 'html.parser')
print(soup.prettify()) # Patchwork performed! Missing tags found.
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Handling comments and scripts

Remove or access comments and script tags:

from bs4 import Comment

# Find and remove all comments
comments = soup.findAll(text=lambda text: isinstance(text, Comment))
[comment.extract() for comment in comments] # Off with their heads!

# Find all script tags
script_tags = soup.find_all('script') # Sparks joy? No? Script tags begone!
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