Question

I am trying to find all p tags with the class column.

<p class="column">This is a column</p>
<p class="column">More columns heh</p>

I tried doing:

soup.find_all(class_='column')

which returned []

Then I tried:

soup.find_all(attrs={'class': 'column'})

and got the right results.

Shouldn’t these two statements be identical? What’s the difference?

Answer 1

The statements are exactly identical, and I was not able to reproduce your problem:

>>> from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
>>> soup = BeautifulSoup('''<div>
... <p class="column">This is a column</p>
... <p class="column">More columns heh</p>
... </div>''')
>>> soup.find_all(class_='column')
[<p class="column">This is a column</p>, <p class="column">More columns heh</p>]
>>> import bs4
>>> bs4.__version__
'4.1.3'

Note that the class_ argument was introduced in version 4.1.2, so do make sure you use a recent version of BeautifulSoup. From the Searching by CSS class section:

As of Beautiful Soup 4.1.2, you can search by CSS class using the keyword argument class_: