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Asked: 2026-05-16T19:44:28+00:00

i have code, which does something like this: item.previous.parent.parent.aTag[‘href’] now i would like to

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i have code, which does something like this:

item.previous.parent.parent.aTag['href']

now i would like to be able to add filters fast, so hardcoding is no longer an option. how can i access the same tags with a path coded in a string?

of course i could invent some format like [(‘getattr’, ‘previous’), (‘getattr’, ‘parent’), …, (‘getitem’, ‘href)] and parse it with __getattr__ and __getitem__.

Now the question: Is there already a more beautiful way of doing it, or do i need to implement it myself?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    It seems to me that you would be better off using a XPATH expression. This discussion has some information about an XPATH plugin for BeautifulSoup called BSXPath. I haven’t used it so I do not know if it will serve your purpose.

    If you are willing to replace BeautifulSoup then lxml has a really powerful XPATH implementation.

    update

    See @llasram‘s comment to this answer:

    These days lxml has an html module which the BeautifulSoup implementer himself recommends over BeautifulSoup. It even has a soupparser sub-module which will use BeautifulSoup to do the parsing!

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