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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-14T05:46:25+00:00

For instance if I am searching by an element’s attribute like id: soup.findAll(‘span’,{‘id’:re.compile(^score_)}) I

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For instance if I am searching by an element’s attribute like id:

soup.findAll('span',{'id':re.compile("^score_")})

I get back a list of the whole span element that matches (which I like).

But if I try to search by the innerText of the html element like this:

soup.findAll('a',text = re.compile("discuss|comment"))

I get back only the innerText part of element back that matches instead of the whole element with tags and attributes like I would above.

Is this possible to do with out finding the match and then getting it’s parent?

Thanks.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You don’t get back the text. You get a NavigableString with the text. That object has methods to go to the parent, etc.

    from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
import re

soup = BeautifulSoup('<html><p>foo</p></html>')

r = soup.findAll('p', text=re.compile('foo'))

print r[0].parent

    prints

    <p>foo</p>
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