Extracting the text content of a specific tag while ignoring the text within other tags nested inside the initial one

Question

Extracting the text content of a specific tag while ignoring the text within other tags nested inside the initial one

I am trying to extract only the text inside the <a> tags from the first <td> element of each <tr>. I have provided examples of the necessary text as "yyy" and examples of unnecessary text as "zzz".

<table>
  <tbody>
    <tr>
      <td>
        <b>zzz</b>
        <a href="#">yyy</a>
        "y"
        <a href="#">yyy</a>
        <sup>zzz</sup>
        <a href="#">yyy</a>
        <a href="#">yyy</a>
        "y"
      </td>
      <td>
        zzzzz
      </td>
    </tr>
  </tbody>
</table>

This is my current approach:

words = []
for tableRows in soup.select("table > tbody > tr"):
  tableData = tableRows.find("td").text
  text = [word.strip() for word in tableData.split(' ') if "<a>" in str(word)]
  words.append(text)
print(words)

However, this code is extracting all the text from the <td>, including unwanted elements:

["zzz", "yyyy", "yyyy", "zzz", "yyyy"]

.

python selenium parsing web-scraping beautifulsoup

Answer 1

Answer №1

Dive into this code snippet:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup, Tag, NavigableString

html_doc = """\
<table>
  <tbody>
    <tr>
      <td>
        <b>zzz</b>
        <a href="#">yyy</a>
        "y"
        <a href="#">yyy</a>
        <sup>zzz</sup>
        <a href="#">yyy</a>
        <a href="#">yyy</a>
        "y"
      </td>
      <td>
        zzzzz
      </td>
    </tr>
  </tbody>
</table>"""

soup = BeautifulSoup(html_doc, "html.parser")

for td in soup.select("td:nth-of-type(1)"):
    for c in td.contents:
        if isinstance(c, Tag) and c.name == "a":
            print(c.text.strip())
        elif isinstance(c, NavigableString):
            c = c.strip()
            if c:
                print(c)

Here's what it prints out:

yyy
"y"
yyy
yyy
yyy
"y"

```
soup.select("td:nth-of-type(1)")
```
specifically targets the first <td>.
We then loop over its .contents to access each element inside.
```
if isinstance(c, Tag) and c.name == "a"
```
checks for a Tag with the name <a>.
```
if isinstance(c, NavigableString)
```
verifies if the content is a plain string.

Answer 2

Dive into this code snippet:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup, Tag, NavigableString

html_doc = """\
<table>
  <tbody>
    <tr>
      <td>
        <b>zzz</b>
        <a href="#">yyy</a>
        "y"
        <a href="#">yyy</a>
        <sup>zzz</sup>
        <a href="#">yyy</a>
        <a href="#">yyy</a>
        "y"
      </td>
      <td>
        zzzzz
      </td>
    </tr>
  </tbody>
</table>"""

soup = BeautifulSoup(html_doc, "html.parser")

for td in soup.select("td:nth-of-type(1)"):
    for c in td.contents:
        if isinstance(c, Tag) and c.name == "a":
            print(c.text.strip())
        elif isinstance(c, NavigableString):
            c = c.strip()
            if c:
                print(c)

Here's what it prints out:

yyy
"y"
yyy
yyy
yyy
"y"

```
soup.select("td:nth-of-type(1)")
```
specifically targets the first <td>.
We then loop over its .contents to access each element inside.
```
if isinstance(c, Tag) and c.name == "a"
```
checks for a Tag with the name <a>.
```
if isinstance(c, NavigableString)
```
verifies if the content is a plain string.

Answer 3

Answer №2

As per the given example, we are using the children of the td tag. Next step is to verify if there is a child named a with no value assigned. After that, it checks for child elements with text content and appends them.

words = []

for row in soup.select('table > tbody > tr'):
    for element in row.td.children:        
        if element.name == 'a' or element.name == None:
           if element.text.strip():
              words.append(element.text.strip())
print(words)

Result:

['yyy', '"y"', 'yyy', 'yyy', 'yyy', '"y"']

Answer 4

As per the given example, we are using the children of the td tag. Next step is to verify if there is a child named a with no value assigned. After that, it checks for child elements with text content and appends them.

words = []

for row in soup.select('table > tbody > tr'):
    for element in row.td.children:        
        if element.name == 'a' or element.name == None:
           if element.text.strip():
              words.append(element.text.strip())
print(words)

Result:

['yyy', '"y"', 'yyy', 'yyy', 'yyy', '"y"']

Extracting the text content of a specific tag while ignoring the text within other tags nested inside the initial one

Answer №1

Answer №2

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