Last modified: Sep 20, 2023 By Alexander Williams

Beautiful Soup Find by TAG: A Comprehensive Guide

Using Beautiful Soup's find() and find_all() methods, we can easily find elements by their tag.

Finding First Element by Tag

The find() method returns the first element that matches the given tag. To find the first element by tag, we can use the following syntax:

soup.find(tag_name)

For example, to find the first h1 tag in a document, use this code:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

html_doc = '''
<html>
   <body>
      <h1>Welcome to My Blog</h1>
      <p>This is a tutorial on BeautifulSoup.</p>
      <h1>Welcome to My Article</h1>
   </body>
</html>
'''

soup = BeautifulSoup(html_doc, 'html.parser')

h1_tag = soup.find_all('h1')

print(h1_tag)

The variable h1_tag now contains the first h1 tag. Here is the output:

<h1>Welcome to My Blog</h1>

Finding all elements by tag

The find_all() method returns a list of all elements that match the given tag. To find all elements by tag, we can use the following syntax:

soup.find_all(tag_name)

Here is an example:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

html_doc = '''
<html>
   <body>
      <h1>Welcome to My Blog</h1>
      <p>This is a tutorial on BeautifulSoup.</p>
      <h1>Welcome to My Article</h1>
   </body>
</html>
'''

soup = BeautifulSoup(html_doc, 'html.parser')

h1_tag = soup.find_all('h1')

print(h1_tag)

Output:

[<h1>Welcome to My Blog</h1>, <h1>Welcome to My Article</h1>]

Conclusion

The find() and find_all() methods provided by Beautiful Soup are incredible for finding and fetching elements from HTML and XML documents. 

These methods allow you to easily extract information from websites, gathering data suited to our requirements.

Ready to take your web scraping skills to the next level? Explore more BeautifulSoup tutorials on our blog:

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