python - Beautiful Soup and extracting a div and its contents by ID

178
votes
soup.find("tagName", { "id" : "articlebody" })

Why does this NOT return the <div id="articlebody"> ... </div> tags and stuff in between? It returns nothing. And I know for a fact it exists because I'm staring right at it from 

soup.prettify()

soup.find("div", { "id" : "articlebody" }) also does not work.

(EDIT: I found that BeautifulSoup wasn't correctly parsing my page, which probably meant the page I was trying to parse isn't properly formatted in SGML or whatever)

13
pythonbeautifulsoup
(To your EDIT, this question still has value as a reusable resource to others, even if the parser doesn't work on your particular page) – smci

13 Answers

245
votes

You should post your example document, because the code works fine:

>>> import BeautifulSoup
>>> soup = BeautifulSoup.BeautifulSoup('<html><body><div id="articlebody"> ... </div></body></html')
>>> soup.find("div", {"id": "articlebody"})
<div id="articlebody"> ... </div>

Finding <div>s inside <div>s works as well:

>>> soup = BeautifulSoup.BeautifulSoup('<html><body><div><div id="articlebody"> ... </div></div></body></html')
>>> soup.find("div", {"id": "articlebody"})
<div id="articlebody"> ... </div>
92
votes

To find an element by its id:

div = soup.find(id="articlebody")
28
votes

Beautiful Soup 4 supports most CSS selectors with the .select() method, therefore you can use an id selector such as:

soup.select('#articlebody')

If you need to specify the element's type, you can add a type selector before the id selector:

soup.select('div#articlebody')

The .select() method will return a collection of elements, which means that it would return the same results as the following .find_all() method example:

soup.find_all('div', id="articlebody")
# or
soup.find_all(id="articlebody")

If you only want to select a single element, then you could just use the .find() method:

soup.find('div', id="articlebody")
# or
soup.find(id="articlebody")
14
votes

I think there is a problem when the 'div' tags are too much nested. I am trying to parse some contacts from a facebook html file, and the Beautifulsoup is not able to find tags "div" with class "fcontent".

This happens with other classes as well. When I search for divs in general, it turns only those that are not so much nested.

The html source code can be any page from facebook of the friends list of a friend of you (not the one of your friends). If someone can test it and give some advice I would really appreciate it.

This is my code, where I just try to print the number of tags "div" with class "fcontent":

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup 
f = open('/Users/myUserName/Desktop/contacts.html')
soup = BeautifulSoup(f) 
list = soup.findAll('div', attrs={'class':'fcontent'})
print len(list)
9
votes

Most probably because of the default beautifulsoup parser has problem. Change a different parser, like 'lxml' and try again.

8
votes

In the beautifulsoup source this line allows divs to be nested within divs; so your concern in lukas' comment wouldn't be valid.

NESTABLE_BLOCK_TAGS = ['blockquote', 'div', 'fieldset', 'ins', 'del']

What I think you need to do is to specify the attrs you want such as

source.find('div', attrs={'id':'articlebody'})
5
votes

have you tried soup.findAll("div", {"id": "articlebody"})?

sounds crazy, but if you're scraping stuff from the wild, you can't rule out multiple divs...

5
votes

I used:

soup.findAll('tag', attrs={'attrname':"attrvalue"})

As my syntax for find/findall; that said, unless there are other optional parameters between the tag and attribute list, this shouldn't be different.

4
votes

Here is a code fragment 

soup = BeautifulSoup(:"index.html")
titleList = soup.findAll('title')
divList = soup.findAll('div', attrs={ "class" : "article story"})

As you can see I find all tags and then I find all tags with class="article" inside

4
votes

Happened to me also while trying to scrape Google.
I ended up using pyquery.
Install:

pip install pyquery

Use:

from pyquery import PyQuery    
pq = PyQuery('<html><body><div id="articlebody"> ... </div></body></html')
tag = pq('div#articlebody')
2
votes

The Id property is always uniquely identified. That means you can use it directly without even specifying the element. Therefore, it is a plus point if your elements have it to parse through the content. 

divEle = soup.find(id = "articlebody")
0
votes
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
from requests_html import HTMLSession

url = 'your_url'
session = HTMLSession()
resp = session.get(url)

# if element with id "articlebody" is dynamic, else need not to render
resp.html.render()

soup = bs(resp.html.html, "lxml")
soup.find("div", {"id": "articlebody"})
-2
votes
soup.find("tagName",attrs={ "id" : "articlebody" })