Question

Possible Duplicate:
Using BeautifulSoup, how to guard against elements not being found?

I have the following Python error when Using BeautifulSoup to find all options in a page:

   for item in soup.find(id="start_dateid").find_all('option'):
AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'find_all'

The problem is when the page do not have id=”start_dateid”, will generate an error: AttributeError: ‘NoneType’ object has no attribute ‘find_all’

How to prevent this error?

Answer 1

Assign your “subsoup” to a variable first:

thing = soup.find(id="start_dateid")
if thing:
    for option in thing.find_all('option'):
        # potato potato potato