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Using beautifulsoup, how to I reference table rows in html page

Answer 1

+2 A:

findAll returns a list, so extract the element first:

form = soup.findAll('form')[0]
table = form.findAll('table')[0]  # table inside form

Of course, you should do some error checking (i.e. make sure it's not empty) before indexing into the list.

ars 2010-07-30 04:55:45

Answer 2

+2 A:

I like ars's answer, and certainly agree w/ the need for error-checking;
especially if this is going to be used in any kind of production code.

Here's perhaps a more verbose / explicit way of finding the data you seek:

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup as bs
html = '''<html><body><table><tr><td>some text</td></tr></table>
    <form><table><tr><td>some text we care about</td></tr>
    <tr><td>more text we care about</td></tr>
    </table></form></html></body>'''    
soup = bs(html)

for tr in soup.form.findAll('tr'):
    print tr.text
# output:
# some text we care about
# more text we care about

For reference here is the cleaned-up HTML:

>>> print soup.prettify()
<html>
 <body>
  <table>
   <tr>
    <td>
     some text
    </td>
   </tr>
  </table>
  <form>
   <table>
    <tr>
     <td>
      some text we care about
     </td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
     <td>
      more text we care about
     </td>
    </tr>
   </table>
  </form>
 </body>
</html>

Adam Bernier 2010-07-30 05:17:48

+1, well thought out answer.

ars 2010-07-30 22:32:14

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Using beautifulsoup, how to I reference table rows in html page

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