Question

The page is: http://item.taobao.com/item.htm?id=13015989524
you can see its source code.

In its source code the following code exists

<a href="http://item.taobao.com/item.htm?id=13015989524" target="_blank">

But when I use BeautifulSoup to read the source code and execute the following

soup.findAll('a', href="http://item.taobao.com/item.htm?id=13015989524")

It returns [] empty. What does it return ‘[]’?

Answer 1

As far as I can see, the <a> tag you are trying to find is inside a <textarea> tag. BS does not parse the contents of <textarea> as HTML, and rightly so since <textarea> should not contain HTML. In short, that page is doing something sketchy.

If you really need to get that, you might “cheat” and parse the contents of <textarea> again and search within them:

import urllib
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup as BS

soup = BS(urllib.urlopen("http://item.taobao.com/item.htm?id=13015989524"))

a = []
for textarea in soup.findAll("textarea"):
    textsoup = BS(textarea.text)  # parse the contents as html
    a.extend(textsoup.findAll("a", attrs={"href":"http://item.taobao.com/item.htm?id=13015989524"}))

for tag in a:
    print tag

# outputs
# <a href="http://item.taobao.com/item.htm?id=13015989524" target="_blank"><img ...
# <a href="http://item.taobao.com/item.htm?id=13015989524" title="901 ...