I want to extract only the text from the top-most element of my soup; however soup.text gives the text of all the child elements as well:
I have
import BeautifulSoup
soup=BeautifulSoup.BeautifulSoup('<html>yes<b>no</b></html>')
print soup.text
The output to this is yesno. I want simply 'yes'.
What's the best way of achieving this?
Edit: I also want yes to be output when parsing '<html><b>no</b>yes</html>'.
what about .find(text=True)?
>>> BeautifulSoup.BeautifulSOAP('<html>yes<b>no</b></html>').find(text=True)
u'yes'
>>> BeautifulSoup.BeautifulSOAP('<html><b>no</b>yes</html>').find(text=True)
u'no'
EDIT:
I think that I've understood what you want now. Try this:
>>> BeautifulSoup.BeautifulSOAP('<html><b>no</b>yes</html>').html.find(text=True, recursive=False)
u'yes'
>>> BeautifulSoup.BeautifulSOAP('<html>yes<b>no</b></html>').html.find(text=True, recursive=False)
u'yes'
You could use contents
>>> print soup.html.contents[0]
yes
or to get all the texts under html, use findAll(text=True, recursive=False)
>>> soup = BeautifulSoup.BeautifulSOAP('<html>x<b>no</b>yes</html>')
>>> soup.html.findAll(text=True, recursive=False)
[u'x', u'yes']
above joined to form a single string
>>> ''.join(soup.html.findAll(text=True, recursive=False))
u'xyes'
This works for me in bs4:
import bs4
node = bs4.BeautifulSoup('<html><div>A<span>B</span>C</div></html>').find('div')
print "".join([t for t in node.contents if type(t)==bs4.element.NavigableString])
output:
AC
You might want to look into lxml's soupparser module, which has support for XPath:
>>> from lxml.html.soupparser import fromstring
>>> s1 = '<html>yes<b>no</b></html>'
>>> s2 = '<html><b>no</b>yes</html>'
>>> soup1 = fromstring(s1)
>>> soup2 = fromstring(s2)
>>> soup1.xpath("text()")
['yes']
>>> soup2.xpath("text()")
['yes']
