Question

I am trying to access content in certain td tags with Python and BeautifulSoup. I can either get the first td tag meeting the criteria (with find), or all of them (with findAll).

Now, I could just use findAll, get them all, and get the content I want out of them, but that seems like it is inefficient (even if I put limits on the search). Is there anyway to go to a certain td tag meeting the criteria I want? Say the third, or the 10th?

Here’s my code so far:

from __future__ import division
from __future__ import unicode_literals
from __future__ import print_function
from mechanize import Browser
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup

br = Browser()
url = "http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=goog+Key+Statistics"
page = br.open(url)
html = page.read()
soup = BeautifulSoup(html)
td = soup.findAll("td", {'class': 'yfnc_tablehead1'})

for x in range(len(td)):
    var1 = td[x]
    var2 = var1.contents[0]
    print(var2)

Answer 1

find and findAll are very flexible, the BeautifulSoup.findAll docs say

5. You can pass in a callable object
which takes a Tag object as its only
argument, and returns a boolean. Every
Tag object that findAll encounters
will be passed into this object, and
if the call returns True then the tag
is considered to match.