How to serialize beautifulsoup access-paths?

Question

i have code, which does something like this:

item.previous.parent.parent.aTag['href']

now i would like to be able to add filters fast, so hardcoding is no longer an option. how can i access the same tags with a path coded in a string?

of course i could invent some format like [('getattr', 'previous'), ('getattr', 'parent'), ..., ('getitem', 'href)] and parse it with _getattr_ and _getitem_.

Now the question: Is there already a more beautiful way of doing it, or do i need to implement it myself?

Answer 1

It seems to me that you would be better off using a XPATH expression. This discussion has some information about an XPATH plugin for BeautifulSoup called BSXPath. I haven't used it so I do not know if it will serve your purpose.

If you are willing to replace BeautifulSoup then lxml has a really powerful XPATH implementation.

update

See @llasram's comment to this answer:

These days lxml has an html module which the BeautifulSoup implementer himself recommends over BeautifulSoup. It even has a soupparser sub-module which will use BeautifulSoup to do the parsing!