Question

I’m honestly finding BeautifulSoup too difficult, the documentation doesn’t explain the basics I’m looking for.

I am trying to return the string inside a tag that has an attribute:

<span class="on">6220</span>

But running this:

def fetch_online():
    users = page('span', {'class' : 'on'})
    return str(users)

Gives me [<span class="on">6220</span>]. So I figured I’m doing it all wrong, what is the way to just get a simple string out of a tag?

Answer 1

You can do it like this:

html = # your HTML source goes here
soup = BeautifulSoup(html)
x = soup.find('span', {'class' : 'on'})
print x.text
print x.string
print x.contents[0]