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‘, ”)
rel_soup. a[‘rel’]
# [‘index’]
rel_soup. a[‘rel’] = [‘index’, ‘contents’]
print(rel_soup. p)
#

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You can disable this by passing multi_valued_attributes=None as a
keyword argument into the BeautifulSoup constructor:
no_list_soup = BeautifulSoup(‘

‘, ”, multi_valued_attributes=None)
no_list_soup. p[‘class’]
# ‘body strikeout’
You can use get_attribute_list to get a value that’s always a
list, whether or not it’s a multi-valued atribute:
t_attribute_list(‘id’)
# [“my id”]
If you parse a document as XML, there are no multi-valued attributes:
xml_soup = BeautifulSoup(‘

‘, ‘xml’)
xml_soup. p[‘class’]
Again, you can configure this using the multi_valued_attributes argument:
class_is_multi= { ‘*’: ‘class’}
xml_soup = BeautifulSoup(‘

‘, ‘xml’, multi_valued_attributes=class_is_multi)
You probably won’t need to do this, but if you do, use the defaults as
a guide. They implement the rules described in the HTML specification:
from er import builder_registry
(‘html’). DEFAULT_CDATA_LIST_ATTRIBUTES
NavigableString¶
A string corresponds to a bit of text within a tag. Beautiful Soup
uses the NavigableString class to contain these bits of text:
# ‘Extremely bold’
type()
#
A NavigableString is just like a Python Unicode string, except
that it also supports some of the features described in Navigating
the tree and Searching the tree. You can convert a
NavigableString to a Unicode string with unicode() (in
Python 2) or str (in Python 3):
unicode_string = str()
unicode_string
type(unicode_string)
#
You can’t edit a string in place, but you can replace one string with
another, using replace_with():
(“No longer bold”)
# No longer bold
NavigableString supports most of the features described in
Navigating the tree and Searching the tree, but not all of
them. In particular, since a string can’t contain anything (the way a
tag may contain a string or another tag), strings don’t support the. contents or attributes, or the find() method.
If you want to use a NavigableString outside of Beautiful Soup,
you should call unicode() on it to turn it into a normal Python
Unicode string. If you don’t, your string will carry around a
reference to the entire Beautiful Soup parse tree, even when you’re
done using Beautiful Soup. This is a big waste of memory.
BeautifulSoup¶
The BeautifulSoup object represents the parsed document as a
whole. For most purposes, you can treat it as a Tag
object. This means it supports most of the methods described in
Navigating the tree and Searching the tree.
You can also pass a BeautifulSoup object into one of the methods
defined in Modifying the tree, just as you would a Tag. This
lets you do things like combine two parsed documents:
doc = BeautifulSoup(“INSERT FOOTER HEREHere’s the footer

“, “xml”)
(text=”INSERT FOOTER HERE”). replace_with(footer)
# ‘INSERT FOOTER HERE’
print(doc)
#
#

Since the BeautifulSoup object doesn’t correspond to an actual
HTML or XML tag, it has no name and no attributes. But sometimes it’s
useful to look at its, so it’s been given the special
“[document]”:
Here’s the “Three sisters” HTML document again:
html_doc = “””

I’ll use this as an example to show you how to move from one part of
a document to another.
Going down¶
Tags may contain strings and other tags. These elements are the tag’s
children. Beautiful Soup provides a lot of different attributes for
navigating and iterating over a tag’s children.
Note that Beautiful Soup strings don’t support any of these
attributes, because a string can’t have children.
Navigating using tag names¶
The simplest way to navigate the parse tree is to say the name of the
tag you want. If you want the tag, just say
#
You can do use this trick again and again to zoom in on a certain part
of the parse tree. This code gets the first tag beneath the tag:
# The Dormouse’s story
Using a tag name as an attribute will give you only the first tag by that
name:
If you need to get all the tags, or anything more complicated
than the first tag with a certain name, you’ll need to use one of the
methods described in Searching the tree, such as find_all():
# Tillie]. contents and. children¶
A tag’s children are available in a list called. contents:
head_tag =
head_tag
ntents
# []
title_tag = ntents[0]
title_tag
# [‘The Dormouse’s story’]
The BeautifulSoup object itself has children. In this case, the
tag is the child of the BeautifulSoup object. :
len(ntents)
# 1
ntents[0]
# ‘html’
A string does not have. contents, because it can’t contain
anything:
text = ntents[0]
# AttributeError: ‘NavigableString’ object has no attribute ‘contents’
Instead of getting them as a list, you can iterate over a tag’s
children using the. children generator:
for child in ildren:
print(child)
# The Dormouse’s story. descendants¶
The. children attributes only consider a tag’s
direct children. For instance, the tag has a single direct
child–the
An HTML parser takes this string of characters and turns it into a
series of events: “open an tag”, “open a tag”, “open a