Question

Hello 🙂 After playing around for a bit, I’ve come up with the following function, which returns the full HTML tag, rather than simply the part in inverted <>”this”<>

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
from urllib2 import urlopen

def get_wotd():
    return str((BeautifulSoup(urlopen('http://www.reference.com/wordoftheday'))).findAll('h2'))

print get_wotd()

Today’s word, for instance is “nosh”. Instead of getting:

[<h2 class="me">nosh</h2>]

I need the output to be, simply,

nosh

Anyone got any idea how I could pull this off?

Answer 1

Use .text attribute to fetch inner-text, and use find() method instead:

>>> from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
>>> from urllib2 import urlopen
>>> soup = BeautifulSoup(urlopen('http://www.reference.com/wordoftheday'))
>>> soup.find('h2').text
u'nosh'