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Diffstat (limited to 'doc/source')
| -rw-r--r-- | doc/source/index.rst | 22 |
1 files changed, 17 insertions, 5 deletions
diff --git a/doc/source/index.rst b/doc/source/index.rst index 44d16d3..00ee467 100644 --- a/doc/source/index.rst +++ b/doc/source/index.rst @@ -505,11 +505,23 @@ done using Beautiful Soup. This is a big waste of memory. ``BeautifulSoup`` ----------------- -The ``BeautifulSoup`` object itself represents the document as a +The ``BeautifulSoup`` object represents the parsed document as a whole. For most purposes, you can treat it as a :ref:`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 :ref:`Tag`. This +lets you do things like combine two parsed documents:: + + doc = BeautifulSoup("<document><content/>INSERT FOOTER HERE</document", "xml") + footer = BeautifulSoup("<footer>Here's the footer</footer>", "xml") + doc.find(text="INSERT FOOTER HERE").replace_with(footer) + # u'INSERT FOOTER HERE' + print(doc) + # <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> + # <document><content/><footer>Here's the footer</footer></document> + 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 ``.name``, so it's been given the special @@ -1861,8 +1873,8 @@ attributes, and delete attributes:: Modifying ``.string`` --------------------- -If you set a tag's ``.string`` attribute, the tag's contents are -replaced with the string you give:: +If you set a tag's ``.string`` attribute to a new string, the tag's contents are +replaced with that string:: markup = '<a href="http://example.com/">I linked to <i>example.com</i></a>' soup = BeautifulSoup(markup) @@ -1871,9 +1883,9 @@ replaced with the string you give:: tag.string = "New link text." tag # <a href="http://example.com/">New link text.</a> - + Be careful: if the tag contained other tags, they and all their -contents will be destroyed. +contents will be destroyed. ``append()`` ------------ |