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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-04T03:55:52+00:00

I’m trying to parse through a table of rows using beautiful soup and save

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I’m trying to parse through a table of rows using beautiful soup and save values of each row in a dict.

One hiccup is the structure of the table has some rows as the section headers. So for any row with the class ‘header’ I want to define a variable called “section”. Here’s what I have, but it’s not working because it’s saying [‘class’] TypeError: string indices must be integers

Here’s what I have:

for i in credits.contents:
    if i['class'] == 'header':
        section = i.contents
        DATA_SET[section] = {}
    else:
        DATA_SET[section]['data_point_1'] = i.find('td', {'class' : 'data_point_1'}).find('p').contents
        DATA_SET[section]['data_point_2'] = i.find('td', {'class' : 'data_point_2'}).find('p').contents
        DATA_SET[section]['data_point_3'] = i.find('td', {'class' : 'data_point_3'}).find('p').contents

Example of data:

<table class="credits">
    <tr class="header">
        <th colspan="3"><h1>HEADER NAME</h1></th>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td class="data_point_1"><p>DATA</p></td>
        <td class="data_point_2"><p>DATA</p></td>
        <td class="data_point_3"><p>DATA</p></td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td class="data_point_1"><p>DATA</p></td>
        <td class="data_point_2"><p>DATA</p></td>
        <td class="data_point_3"><p>DATA</p></td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td class="data_point_1"><p>DATA</p></td>
        <td class="data_point_2"><p>DATA</p></td>
        <td class="data_point_3"><p>DATA</p></td>
    </tr>
    <tr class="header">
        <th colspan="3"><h1>HEADER NAME</h1></th>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td class="data_point_1"><p>DATA</p></td>
        <td class="data_point_2"><p>DATA</p></td>
        <td class="data_point_3"><p>DATA</p></td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td class="data_point_1"><p>DATA</p></td>
        <td class="data_point_2"><p>DATA</p></td>
        <td class="data_point_3"><p>DATA</p></td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td class="data_point_1"><p>DATA</p></td>
        <td class="data_point_2"><p>DATA</p></td>
        <td class="data_point_3"><p>DATA</p></td>
    </tr>
</table>
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Here is one solution, with a slight adaptation of your example data so that the result is clearer:

    from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
from pprint import pprint

html = '''<body><table class="credits">
    <tr class="header">
        <th colspan="3"><h1>HEADER 1</h1></th>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td class="data_point_1"><p>DATA11</p></td>
        <td class="data_point_2"><p>DATA12</p></td>
        <td class="data_point_3"><p>DATA12</p></td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td class="data_point_1"><p>DATA21</p></td>
        <td class="data_point_2"><p>DATA22</p></td>
        <td class="data_point_3"><p>DATA23</p></td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td class="data_point_1"><p>DATA31</p></td>
        <td class="data_point_2"><p>DATA32</p></td>
        <td class="data_point_3"><p>DATA33</p></td>
    </tr>
    <tr class="header">
        <th colspan="3"><h1>HEADER 2</h1></th>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td class="data_point_1"><p>DATA11</p></td>
        <td class="data_point_2"><p>DATA12</p></td>
        <td class="data_point_3"><p>DATA13</p></td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td class="data_point_1"><p>DATA21</p></td>
        <td class="data_point_2"><p>DATA22</p></td>
        <td class="data_point_3"><p>DATA23</p></td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td class="data_point_1"><p>DATA31</p></td>
        <td class="data_point_2"><p>DATA32</p></td>
        <td class="data_point_3"><p>DATA33</p></td>
    </tr>
</table></body>'''

soup = BeautifulSoup(html)
rows = soup.findAll('tr')

section = ''
dataset = {}
for row in rows:
    if row.attrs:
        section = row.text
        dataset[section] = {}
    else:
        cells = row.findAll('td')
        for cell in cells:
            if cell['class'] in dataset[section]:
                dataset[section][ cell['class'] ].append( cell.text )
            else:
                dataset[section][ cell['class'] ] = [ cell.text ]

pprint(dataset)

    Produces:

    {u'HEADER 1': {u'data_point_1': [u'DATA11', u'DATA21', u'DATA31'],
               u'data_point_2': [u'DATA12', u'DATA22', u'DATA32'],
               u'data_point_3': [u'DATA12', u'DATA23', u'DATA33']},
 u'HEADER 2': {u'data_point_1': [u'DATA11', u'DATA21', u'DATA31'],
               u'data_point_2': [u'DATA12', u'DATA22', u'DATA32'],
               u'data_point_3': [u'DATA13', u'DATA23', u'DATA33']}}

    EDIT ADAPTATION OF YOUR SOLUTION

    Your code is neat and has only a couple of issues. You use contents in places where you shoul duse text or findAll — I repaired that below:

    soup = BeautifulSoup(html)
credits = soup.find('table')

section = ''
DATA_SET = {}

for i in credits.findAll('tr'):
    if i.get('class', '') == 'header':
        section = i.text
        DATA_SET[section] = {}
    else:
        DATA_SET[section]['data_point_1'] = i.find('td', {'class' : 'data_point_1'}).find('p').contents
        DATA_SET[section]['data_point_2'] = i.find('td', {'class' : 'data_point_2'}).find('p').contents
        DATA_SET[section]['data_point_3'] = i.find('td', {'class' : 'data_point_3'}).find('p').contents

print DATA_SET

    Please note that if successive cells have the same data_point class, then successive rows will replace earlier ones. I suspect this is not an issue in your real dataset, but that is why your code would return this, abbreviated, result:

    {u'HEADER 2': {'data_point_2': [u'DATA32'],
               'data_point_3': [u'DATA33'],
               'data_point_1': [u'DATA31']},
 u'HEADER 1': {'data_point_2': [u'DATA32'],
               'data_point_3': [u'DATA33'],
               'data_point_1': [u'DATA31']}}
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