Question

I’m trying to use BeautifulSoup to parse some XML that looks like

<a>
  <b>
    <c>
      <d attr="x">
        <e>
        </e>
        <name>
        </name>
      </d>
    </c>
    <c>
      ...
    <c>
  </b>
</a>

but I can’t figure out how to access e or name in a loop. This works:

print soup.a.b.c.d.e

but this doesn’t:

for subtag in soup.a.b.c:
    print subtag.d.e

instead it gives this error:

AttributeError: 'NavigableString' object has no attribute 'd'

and somewhat unrelatedly, this:

print soup.a.b.c.d.name

only outputs d.

What am I doing wrong? I suspect for the second issue I will have to use find() instead because that object already has a name attribute. Is there a nicer way?

Answer 1

You get an AttributeError because BSS returns NavigableStrings when you loop over Tag instances. Maybe you want to try:

soup.a.b.c.findChildren()
#[<d attr="x">
#<e>
#</e>
#<name>
#</name>
#</d>, <e>
#</e>, <name>
#</name>]

Regarding the issue w/ name: it is specified as an attribute, but you can instead do:

soup.a.b.c.d.findChildren('name')
#[<name>
#</name>]

Set-up code for reference:

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulStoneSoup as bss
soup = bss(markup)