Example HTML
<h2 id="name">
ABC
<span class="numbers">123</span>
<span class="lower">abc</span>
</h2>
I can get the numbers with something like:
soup.select('#name > span.numbers')[0].text
How do I get the text ABC using BeautifulSoup and the select function?
What about in this case?
<div id="name">
<div id="numbers">123</div>
ABC
</div>
In the first case, get the previous sibling:
soup.select_one('#name > span.numbers').previous_sibling
In the second case, get the next sibling:
soup.select_one('#name > #numbers').next_sibling
Note that I assume that it is intentional that here you have the numbers as an id value and the tag is div instead of span. Hence, I've adjusted the CSS selector.
To cover both cases, you can go to the parent of the tag and find the non-empty text node in a non-recursive mode:
parent = soup.select_one('#name > .numbers,#numbers').parent
print(parent.find(text=lambda text: text and text.strip(), recursive=False).strip())
Note the change in the selector - we are asking to match either numbers id or numbers class.
Though, I have a feeling that this universal solution would not be quite reliable because, for starters, I don't know what your real inputs could be.
contents list: tag.contents[0] or tag.contents[1]. Or, go through the tag.children generator.