Question

I’m trying to check whether a numerical value is found in a table. Why would this code not find the numerical text “699” in this table? The print statement gives a value of “None.”

html = """

<table>
December 31,                            1997     1996     1995     1994     1993
Allowance for credit losses--loans       699      773
Allowance for credit losses--
  trading assets                         285      190
Allowance for credit losses--
  other liabilities                       13       10
- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
   Total                              $  997   $  973   $  992   $1,252   $1,324
================================================================================
</table>

"""

soup = BeautifulSoup(''.join(html))
table = soup.find('table')
test = table.find(text='699')
print test

Answer 1

table.find() will search all tags inside the table, but there are no tags inside the table. There is just a string, which happens to be an ASCII table which is in no way formatted as HTML.

If you want to use BeautifulSoup to parse the table, you need to convert it into an HTML table first. Otherwise you can use table.string to get the string itself and parse that with regex.