Beautiful Soup 4 Cheatsheet

Assume t is an object of Tag.

Core concepts (classes)

Tag, a Tag object corresponds to an XML or HTML tag.
BeautifulSoup, the BeautifulSoup object represents the parsed document as a whole. You can treat it like a special Tag. It needs a parser to parse the document, a built-in parser is "html.parser", e.g. soup = BeautifulSoup("<html>a web page</html>", 'html.parser')
NavigableString, a string corresponds to a bit of text (as you see it in the browser) within a tag. A NavigableString is just like a Python Unicode string, except that it also supports some of the features for navigating the tree and searching the tree.

Object attributes:

t.name, the text inside the angle brackets, for example, <a>
t.attrs, accesses all attributes of a tag as a dict
t["foo"], gets the HTML/XML attribute of "foo", set it by t["foo"] = "bar" Beautiful Soup presents the value(s) of a multi-valued attribute as a list, e.g. t['class']
t.string gets the text within a tag
t.get_text() gets the human-readable text as a string inside a document/tag

get the first tag by its name, e.g. t.head, t.title
get all direct children as a list by t.contents, or using the .children generator, e.g. for tag in t.children: pass
t.parents to iterate over all of an element's parents
t.previous_sibling, t.next_sibling to go sideways, or t.previous_siblings, t.next_siblings to iterate over siblings.

Filter types:

Search methods:

t.find_all() looks through a tag’s descendants and retrieves all descendants that match your filters
t.select() matches elements by using CSS selectors
t.find() likes find_all() but it only finds one result
t.find_parents() and t.find_parent()
t.find_parents() and t.find_parent()
t.find_next_siblings() and t.find_next_sibling()
t.find_previous_siblings() and t.find_previous_sibling()

Python BeautifulSoup