Does BeautifulSoup can locate the element basing on contained text? [duplicate] - beautifulsoup

Question

Observe the following problem:
import re
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup as BS
soup = BS("""
<a href="/customer-menu/1/accounts/1/update">
Edit
</a>
""")
# This returns the <a> element
soup.find(
'a',
href="/customer-menu/1/accounts/1/update",
text=re.compile(".*Edit.*")
)
soup = BS("""
<a href="/customer-menu/1/accounts/1/update">
<i class="fa fa-edit"></i> Edit
</a>
""")
# This returns None
soup.find(
'a',
href="/customer-menu/1/accounts/1/update",
text=re.compile(".*Edit.*")
)
For some reason, BeautifulSoup will not match the text, when the <i> tag is there as well. Finding the tag and showing its text produces
>>> a2 = soup.find(
'a',
href="/customer-menu/1/accounts/1/update"
)
>>> print(repr(a2.text))
'\n Edit\n'
Right. According to the Docs, soup uses the match function of the regular expression, not the search function. So I need to provide the DOTALL flag:
pattern = re.compile('.*Edit.*')
pattern.match('\n Edit\n') # Returns None
pattern = re.compile('.*Edit.*', flags=re.DOTALL)
pattern.match('\n Edit\n') # Returns MatchObject
Alright. Looks good. Let's try it with soup
soup = BS("""
<a href="/customer-menu/1/accounts/1/update">
<i class="fa fa-edit"></i> Edit
</a>
""")
soup.find(
'a',
href="/customer-menu/1/accounts/1/update",
text=re.compile(".*Edit.*", flags=re.DOTALL)
) # Still return None... Why?!
Edit
My solution based on geckons answer: I implemented these helpers:
import re
MATCH_ALL = r'.*'
def like(string):
"""
Return a compiled regular expression that matches the given
string with any prefix and postfix, e.g. if string = "hello",
the returned regex matches r".*hello.*"
"""
string_ = string
if not isinstance(string_, str):
string_ = str(string_)
regex = MATCH_ALL + re.escape(string_) + MATCH_ALL
return re.compile(regex, flags=re.DOTALL)
def find_by_text(soup, text, tag, **kwargs):
"""
Find the tag in soup that matches all provided kwargs, and contains the
text.
If no match is found, return None.
If more than one match is found, raise ValueError.
"""
elements = soup.find_all(tag, **kwargs)
matches = []
for element in elements:
if element.find(text=like(text)):
matches.append(element)
if len(matches) > 1:
raise ValueError("Too many matches:\n" + "\n".join(matches))
elif len(matches) == 0:
return None
else:
return matches[0]
Now, when I want to find the element above, I just run find_by_text(soup, 'Edit', 'a', href='/customer-menu/1/accounts/1/update')

Answer 1

The problem is that your <a> tag with the <i> tag inside, doesn't have the string attribute you expect it to have. First let's take a look at what text="" argument for find() does.
NOTE: The text argument is an old name, since BeautifulSoup 4.4.0 it's called string.
From the docs:
Although string is for finding strings, you can combine it with
arguments that find tags: Beautiful Soup will find all tags whose
.string matches your value for string. This code finds the tags
whose .string is “Elsie”:
soup.find_all("a", string="Elsie")
# [Elsie]
Now let's take a look what Tag's string attribute is (from the docs again):
If a tag has only one child, and that child is a NavigableString, the
child is made available as .string:
title_tag.string
# u'The Dormouse's story'
(...)
If a tag contains more than one thing, then it’s not clear what
.string should refer to, so .string is defined to be None:
print(soup.html.string)
# None
This is exactly your case. Your <a> tag contains a text and <i> tag. Therefore, the find gets None when trying to search for a string and thus it can't match.
How to solve this?
Maybe there is a better solution but I would probably go with something like this:
import re
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup as BS
soup = BS("""
<a href="/customer-menu/1/accounts/1/update">
<i class="fa fa-edit"></i> Edit
</a>
""")
links = soup.find_all('a', href="/customer-menu/1/accounts/1/update")
for link in links:
if link.find(text=re.compile("Edit")):
thelink = link
break
print(thelink)
I think there are not too many links pointing to /customer-menu/1/accounts/1/update so it should be fast enough.

Answer 2

in one line using lambda
soup.find(lambda tag:tag.name=="a" and "Edit" in tag.text)

Answer 3

You can pass a function that return True if a text contains "Edit" to .find
In [51]: def Edit_in_text(tag):
....: return tag.name == 'a' and 'Edit' in tag.text
....:
In [52]: soup.find(Edit_in_text, href="/customer-menu/1/accounts/1/update")
Out[52]:
<a href="/customer-menu/1/accounts/1/update">
<i class="fa fa-edit"></i> Edit
</a>
EDIT:
You can use the .get_text() method instead of the text in your function which gives the same result:
def Edit_in_text(tag):
return tag.name == 'a' and 'Edit' in tag.get_text()

Answer 4

With soupsieve 2.1.0 you can use :-soup-contains css pseudo class selector to target a node's text. This replaces the deprecated form of :contains().
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup as BS
soup = BS("""
<a href="/customer-menu/1/accounts/1/update">
Edit
</a>
""")
single = soup.select_one('a:-soup-contains("Edit")').text.strip()
multiple = [i.text.strip() for i in soup.select('a:-soup-contains("Edit")')]
print(single, '\n', multiple)

Answer 5

Method - 1: Checking text property
pattern = 'Edit'
a2 = soup.find_all('a', string = pattern)[0]
Method - 2: Using lambda iterate through all elements
a2 = soup.find(lambda tag:tag.name=="a" and "Edit" in tag.text)
Good Luck