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Diffstat (limited to 'doc/source')
| -rw-r--r-- | doc/source/index.rst | 42 |
1 files changed, 19 insertions, 23 deletions
diff --git a/doc/source/index.rst b/doc/source/index.rst index 52f3cc2..8e0204b 100644 --- a/doc/source/index.rst +++ b/doc/source/index.rst @@ -1214,6 +1214,20 @@ keyword argument:: soup.find_all(href=re.compile("elsie"), id='link1') # [<a class="sister" href="http://example.com/elsie" id="link1">three</a>] +Some attributes, like the data-* attributes in HTML 5, have names that +can't be used as the names of keyword arguments:: + + data_soup = BeautifulSoup('<div data-foo="value">foo!</div>') + data_soup.find_all(data-foo="value") + # SyntaxError: keyword can't be an expression + +You can use these attributes in searches by putting them into a +dictionary and passing the dictionary into ``find_all()`` as the +``attrs`` argument:: + + data_soup.find_all(attrs={"data-foo": "value"}) + # [<div data-foo="value">foo!</div>] + .. _attrs: Searching by CSS class @@ -1272,34 +1286,16 @@ should use a CSS selector:: css_soup.select("p.strikeout.body") # [<p class="body strikeout"></p>] -There's a shortcut for ``class_`` present in all versions of Beautiful -Soup. The second argument to any ``find()``-type method is called -``attrs``, and passing in a string for ``attrs`` will search for that -string as a CSS class:: +In older versions of Beautiful Soup, which don't have the ``class_`` +shortcut, you can use the ``attrs`` trick mentioned above. Create a +dictionary whose value for "class" is the string (or regular +expression, or whatever) you want to search for:: - soup.find_all("a", "sister") + soup.find_all("a", attrs={"class": "sister"}) # [<a class="sister" href="http://example.com/elsie" id="link1">Elsie</a>, # <a class="sister" href="http://example.com/lacie" id="link2">Lacie</a>, # <a class="sister" href="http://example.com/tillie" id="link3">Tillie</a>] -You can also pass in a regular expression, a function or -True--anything except a dictionary. Whatever you pass in will be -used to search against the CSS class, the same as if you'd passed it -in for the ``class_`` keyword argument:: - - soup.find_all("p", re.compile("itl")) - # [<p class="title"><b>The Dormouse's story</b></p>] - -By passing in a dictionary to ``attrs``, you can search many HTML -attributes at once, not just the CSS class. These two lines of code -are equivalent:: - - soup.find_all(href=re.compile("elsie"), id='link1') - soup.find_all(attrs={'href' : re.compile("elsie"), 'id': 'link1'}) - -This isn't a very useful feature, since it's usually easier -to use the keyword arguments. - .. _text: The ``text`` argument |