Question

Sample code:

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup, SoupStrainer

html='''<tr>
<td align="left">Foo<br />
Bar<br /></td>
</tr>'''

soup=BeautifulSoup(html)
rows=soup.findAll('tr')
print rows
print rows[0].text.encode("utf8")

I would like the output to be something like “Foo Bar” or even if there was an actual newline between the two lines that would be fine, but the output I get just has “FooBar”, note that there is no whitespace between the two lines.

Very new to python and beautifulsoup, can someone give a hand?

Answer 1

You can go one level further using cell = rows[0].find('td'), then see its contents using cell.contents, then filter the elements you need, then join them by spaces.

Another option: you can use a regular expression for replacing the <br /> by a space. for that you can write:

import re
s = re.sub('<br\s*?>', ' ', rows[0].text)

Then you can replace multiple consecutive whitespaces by

s = re.sub('\s+', ' ', s)

Then the string should look like this:

>>> print s
<tr> <td align="left">Foo Bar </td> </tr>

Then you can easily extract the part you need.