Extracting an attribute value with beautifulsoup

Question

I am trying to extract the content of a single "value" attribute in a specific "input" tag on a webpage. I use the following code:

import urllib
f = urllib.urlopen("http://58.68.130.147")
s = f.read()
f.close()

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulStoneSoup
soup = BeautifulStoneSoup(s)

inputTag = soup.findAll(attrs={"name" : "stainfo"})

output = inputTag['value']

print str(output)

I get a TypeError: list indices must be integers, not str

even though from the Beautifulsoup documentation i understand that strings should not be a problem here... but i a no specialist and i may have misunderstood.

Any suggestion is greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

.findAll() returns list of all found elements, so:

inputTag = soup.findAll(attrs={"name" : "stainfo"})

inputTag is a list (probably containing only one element). Depending on what you want exactly you either should do:

 output = inputTag[0]['value']

or use .find() method which returns only one (first) found element:

 inputTag = soup.find(attrs={"name": "stainfo"})
 output = inputTag['value']