Question

I want to download some html pages and extract informations, each HTML page has this table tag:

<table class="sobi2Details" style='background-image: url(http://www.imd.ir/components/com_sobi2/images/backgrounds/grey.gif);border-style: solid; border-color: #808080' >
    <tr>
        <td><h1>Dr Jhon Doe</h1></td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td></td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td></td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td>
          <div id="sobi2outer">
             <br/>
             <span id="sobi2Details_field_name" ><span id="sobi2Listing_field_name_label">name:</span>Jhon</span><br/>
             <span id="sobi2Details_field_family" ><span id="sobi2Listing_field_family_label">family:</span> Doe</span><br/>
             <span id="sobi2Details_field_tel1" ><span id="sobi2Listing_field_tel1_label">tel:</span> 33727464</span><br/>
          </div>
        </td>
    </tr>
</table>

I want to access name (Jhone) ,family (Doe) and tel[phone]),I’ve used beausiful soup to access these span tags by id:

name=soup.find(id="sobi2Details_field_name").__str__()
family=soup.find(id="sobi2Details_field_family").__str__()
tel=soup.find(id="sobi2Details_field_tel1").__str__()

but I don’t know how to extract data into these tags.I tryed to use children and content attributes,but when I use theme as a tag It returns None:

name=soup.find(id="sobi2Details_field_name")
for child in name.children:
    #process content inside

but I get this error:

'NoneType' object has no attribute 'children'

while when I use str() on it,it is not None!!
any Idea?

Edit:My final solution

soup = BeautifulSoup(page,from_encoding="utf-8")
name_span=soup.find(id="sobi2Details_field_name").__str__()
name=name_span.split(':')[-1]
result = re.sub('</span>', '',name)

Answer 1

I found a couple of ways to do it.

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
soup = BeautifulSoup(open(path_to_html_file))

name_span = soup.find(id="sobi2Details_field_name")

# First way: split text over ':'
# This only works because there's always a ':' before the target field
name = name_span.text.split(':')[1]

# Second way: iterate over the span strings
# The element you look for is always the last one
name = list(name_span.strings)[-1]

# Third way: iterate over 'next' elements
name = name_span.next.next.next # you can create a function to do that, it looks ugly :)

Tell me if it helps.