Extract text from html file with BeautifulSoup/Python

Question

I am trying to extract the text from a html file. The html file looks like this:

<li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-1">
    <a href="#Baden-Württemberg"><span class="tocnumber">1</span>
        <span class="toctext">Baden-Württemberg</span>
    </a>
</li>
<li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-2">
    <a href="#Bayern">
        <span class="tocnumber">2</span>
        <span class="toctext">Bayern</span>
    </a>
</li>
<li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-3">
    <a href="#Berlin">
        <span class="tocnumber">3</span>
        <span class="toctext">Berlin</span>
    </a>
</li>

I want to extract the last text from the last spantag. In the first line it would be "Baden-Würtemberg" after class="toctext"and then put it to a python list.

in Python I tried the following:

names = soup.find_all("span",{"class":"toctext"})

My output the is this list:

[<span class="toctext">Baden-Württemberg</span>, <span class="toctext">Bayern</span>, <span class="toctext">Berlin</span>]

So how can I extract only the text between the tags?

Thanks to all

warnerm06 · Accepted Answer · 2019-06-20 18:05:46Z

2

The find_all method returns a list. Iterate over the list to get the text.

for name in names:
    print(name.text)

Returns:

Baden-Württemberg
Bayern
Berlin

The builtin python dir() and type() methods are always handy to inspect an object.

print(dir(names))

[...,
 '__sizeof__',
 '__str__',
 '__subclasshook__',
 '__weakref__',
 'append',
 'clear',
 'copy',
 'count',
 'extend',
 'index',
 'insert',
 'pop',
 'remove',
 'reverse',
 'sort',
 'source']

answered Jun 20, 2019 at 18:05

warnerm06

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Comments

Sebastien D · Accepted Answer · 2019-06-20 18:11:53Z

0

With a list of comprehension you could do the following :

names = soup.find_all("span",{"class":"toctext"})
print([x.text for x in names])

answered Jun 20, 2019 at 18:11

Sebastien D

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