Question

I have some html code that contains many <table>s in it.

I’m trying to get the information in the second table. Is there a way to do this without using soup.findAll('table') ?

When I do use soup.findAll('table'), I get an error:

ValueError: too many values to unpack

Is there a way to get the n-th tag in some code or another way that does not require going through all the tables? Or should I see if I can add titles to the tables? (like <table title="things">)

There are also headers (<h4>title</h4>) above each table, if that helps.

Thanks.

EDIT

Here’s what I was thinking when I asked the question:

I was unpacking the objects into two values, when there were many more. I thought this would just give me the first two things from the list, but of course, it kept giving me the error mentioned above. I was unaware the return value was a list and thought it was a special object or something and I was basing my code off of my friends’.

I was thinking this error meant there were too many tables on the page and that it couldn’t handle all of them, so I was asking for a way to do it without the method I was using. I probably should have stopped assuming things.

Now I know it returns a list and I can use this in a for loop or get a value from it with soup.findAll('table')[someNumber]. I learned what unpacking was and how to use it, as well. Thanks everyone who helped.

Hopefully that clears things up, now that I know what I’m doing my question makes less sense than it did when I asked it, so I thought I’d just put a note here on what I was thinking.

EDIT 2:

This question is now pretty old, but I still see that I was never really clear about what I was doing.

If it helps anyone, I was attempting to unpack the findAll(...) results, of which the amount of them I didn’t know.

useless_table, table_i_want, another_useless_table = soup.findAll("table");

Since there weren’t always the amount of tables I had guessed in the page, and all the values in the tuple need to be unpacked, I was receiving the ValueError:

ValueError: too many values to unpack

So, I was looking for the way to grab the second (or whichever index) table in the tuple returned without running into errors about how many tables were used.

Answer 1

To get the second table from the call soup.findAll('table'), use it as a list, just index it:

secondtable = soup.findAll('table')[1]