Question

Given an example html string

<table>
<tr>
<td class="td" height="25">Upstream Power</td>
<td class="td">25.2 dBmV</td>
<td class="td">49.2 dBmV</td>
</tr>
</table>

I can find text using:

soup.find_all(text=re.compile("Power"))

But to find the entire tag doesn’t find anything. What am I missing?

soup.find_all("td",text=re.compile("Power"))

Answer 1

In BS3, the method is findAll not find_all:

>>> markup = '''<table>
... <tr>
... <td class="td" height="25">Upstream Power</td>
... <td class="td">25.2 dBmV</td>
... <td class="td">49.2 dBmV</td>
... </tr>
... </table>'''
>>> from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup as bs
>>> soup = bs(markup)
>>> import re
>>> soup.findAll(text=re.compile('Power'))
... [u'Upstream Power']

---

Edit: I see that the method was renamed in BS4. It seems to work OK for me:

>>> from bs4 import BeautifulSoup as bs
>>> soup = bs(markup)
>>> soup.find_all(text=re.compile('Power'))
... [u'Upstream Power']

---

Edit2: To make navigating the parse tree easier, you can use tag names:

>>> soup.td.find_all(text=re.compile('Power'))
... [u'Upstream Power']