Question

I have this code

<a title="Next Page - Results 1 to 60 " href="bla bla" class="smallfont" rel="next">&gt;</a>

I want to grab the a element and get the href .

how can I match the title attribute with Next Page

I want to partially match the text in title attribute of the a element.

There are many a tags on the page similar to it but only difference is that the title attribute contains "Next Page or the text is >.

Answer 1

You would have to use Regex for accomplishing what you want.

First take the entire markup as a string and make a BeautifulSoup object with it.

Then use the .findAll method of the BeautifulSoup object as follows

import BeautifulSoup
import re

soup = BeautifulSoup('<a title="Next Page - Results 1 to 60 " href="bla bla" class="smallfont" rel="next">&gt;</a>')

elements = soup.findAll('a', {'title':re.compile('Next Page.')}) 
# get all 'a' elements with 'title' attribute as 'Next Page something' into a list

for e in elements:
    if str(e.string) == '>' or e.string == '&gt;': # check if string inside 'a' tag is '>'
        print e['href']