Navigating an HTML tree in Python

Question

<td id="aisd_calendar-2014-04-28-0" class="single-day future" colspan="1" rowspan="1" date="**2014-04-28**" >
  <div class="inner">
    <div class="item">
  <div class="view-item view-item-aisd_calendar">
  <div class="calendar monthview">
        <div class="calendar.4168.field_date.8.0 contents">
                      <a href="/event/2013/regular-board-meeting">**Regular Board Meeting**</a>                      <span class="date-display-single">7:00 pm</span>          </div>  
        <div class="cutoff">&nbsp;</div>
      </div> 
  </div>   
</div>  </div>
</td>

I have the above HTML code. I would like to extract the "date" tag (2014-04-28) and "a href" tag (Regular Board Meeting) from the above. How can I do this using Python? Can this be done using Beautiful Soup?

Yes, this can easily be done with BeautifulSoup. I strongly suggest reading the documentation here — TerryA
– TerryA, Commented Mar 24, 2014 at 10:45

alecxe · Accepted Answer · 2014-03-24 13:18:15Z

Here's how you can do it via BeautifulSoup:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup


data = """
<html>
    <body>
        <td id="aisd_calendar-2014-04-28-0" class="single-day future" colspan="1" rowspan="1" date="**2014-04-28**" >
          <div class="inner">
            <div class="item">
          <div class="view-item view-item-aisd_calendar">
          <div class="calendar monthview">
                <div class="calendar.4168.field_date.8.0 contents">
                              <a href="/event/2013/regular-board-meeting">**Regular Board Meeting**</a>                      <span class="date-display-single">7:00 pm</span>          </div>
                <div class="cutoff">&nbsp;</div>
              </div>
          </div>
        </div>  </div>
        </td>
    </body>
</html>
"""
soup = BeautifulSoup(data)

td = soup.body.td  # or soup.find('td', id='aisd_calendar-2014-04-28-0')
print td['date'].strip('*')

link = soup.find('div', {'class': 'contents'}).a
print link['href']

prints:

2014-04-28
/event/2013/regular-board-meeting

Also, if you need to convert the date into python's datetime, you can use strptime():

from datetime import datetime

...

datetime.strptime(td['date'].strip('*'), '%Y-%m-%d')

Hope that helps.

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