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

In Python 3.x, simply use get(attr_name) on your tag object that you get using find_all:

xmlData = None

with open('conf//test1.xml', 'r') as xmlFile:
    xmlData = xmlFile.read()

xmlDecoded = xmlData

xmlSoup = BeautifulSoup(xmlData, 'html.parser')

repElemList = xmlSoup.find_all('repeatingelement')

for repElem in repElemList:
    print("Processing repElem...")
    repElemID = repElem.get('id')
    repElemName = repElem.get('name')

    print("Attribute id = %s" % repElemID)
    print("Attribute name = %s" % repElemName)

against XML file conf//test1.xml that looks like:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<root>
    <singleElement>
        <subElementX>XYZ</subElementX>
    </singleElement>
    <repeatingElement id="11" name="Joe"/>
    <repeatingElement id="12" name="Mary"/>
</root>

prints:

Processing repElem...
Attribute id = 11
Attribute name = Joe
Processing repElem...
Attribute id = 12
Attribute name = Mary

Answer 2

I would actually suggest you a time saving way to go with this assuming that you know what kind of tags have those attributes.

suppose say a tag xyz has that attritube named "staininfo"..

full_tag = soup.findAll("xyz")

And i wan't you to understand that full_tag is a list

for each_tag in full_tag:
    staininfo_attrb_value = each_tag["staininfo"]
    print staininfo_attrb_value

Thus you can get all the attrb values of staininfo for all the tags xyz

Answer 3

.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']

Answer 4

you can also use this :

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import csv

url = "http://58.68.130.147/"
r = requests.get(url)
data = r.text

soup = BeautifulSoup(data, "html.parser")
get_details = soup.find_all("input", attrs={"name":"stainfo"})

for val in get_details:
    get_val = val["value"]
    print(get_val)

Answer 5

If you want to retrieve multiple values of attributes from the source above, you can use findAll and a list comprehension to get everything you need:

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

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulStoneSoup
soup = BeautifulStoneSoup(s)

inputTags = soup.findAll(attrs={"name" : "stainfo"})
### You may be able to do findAll("input", attrs={"name" : "stainfo"})

output = [x["stainfo"] for x in inputTags]

print output
### This will print a list of the values.