Question

On my html page I have a dropdown list:

<select name="somelist">
   <option value="234234234239393">Some Text</option>
</select>

So do get this list I am doing:

ddl = soup.findAll('select', name="somelist")

if(ddl):
    ???

Now I need help with this collection/dictionary, I want to be able to lookup by both ‘Some Text’ and 234234234239393.

Is this possible?

Answer 1

Try the following to get started:

str = r'''
<select name="somelist">
   <option value="234234234239393">Some Text</option>
   <option value="42">Other text</option>
</select>
'''

soup = BeautifulSoup(str)
select_node = soup.findAll('select', attrs={'name': 'somelist'})

if select_node:
    for option in select_node[0].findAll('option'):
        print option

It prints out the option nodes:

<option value="234234234239393">Some Text</option>
<option value="42">Other text</option>

Now, for each option, option['value'] is the value attribute, and option.text is the text inside the tag (“Some Text”)