Question

How to check if elements of the BeautifulSoup parse tree are in the same <p> tag?

Answer 1

• If you know both nodes are directly underneath a <p> tag, check equality of the nodes nodea.getParent() == nodeb.getParent(); more generally, search (recursively) upwards until you hit a <p> tag. Do this separately for each node, then compare the results for equality:

  getContainingPara(nodea) == getContainingPara(nodeb)
  

  (Let’s ignore the corner-case of nested <p> tags.)

• else, iterate through all <p> tags, using text search or regex(es) to search for matches on both:

  pat1 = re.compile(regex1)
  pat2 = re.compile(regex2)
  for para in soup.findAll('p'):
      mat1 = pat1.search(para)
      mat2 = pat2.search(para)
      if not (mat1 or mat2): continue
      # found your match