Question

I try

necessaryStuffOnly = SoupStrainer("table",{"class": "views-table"})
soup = BeautifulSoup(vegetables,parse_only=necessaryStuffOnly)

without luck on a table like this:

<div class="view-content">
  <table class="views-table sticky-enabled cols-20">
    <thead>
      <tr>
        <td>blablaba</td>
      </tr>
    </thead>
    <tbody>
      <tr>
        <td>more blablabla</td>
      </tr>
    </tbody>
  </table>
</div>

and this does work for the div

SoupStrainer("div",{"class": "view-content"})

Can’t a SoupStrainer like this filter on element with multiple classes?

Answer 1

The comparision that’s used is a literal equality check, so the following works:

soup('table', {'class': "views-table sticky-enabled cols-20"})

You can get it to match by doing by passing a function as to the filter:

soup('table', {'class': lambda L: 'views-table' in L.split()})

It might be worth checking the version you’re using, because I have a feeling this shouldn’t be the case anymore… update: yup, here you go https://bugs.launchpad.net/beautifulsoup/+bug/410304