Beautifulsoup - How to get the children of a tag

In this tutorial, we'll learn how to get the children of any tag using two methods:

• .childrens method
• .contents method

We'll also learn the difference between .children and .contents methods.

Get children using the .childrens method

The .children method returns the children of a tag as a generator.

Syntax

element.children

Example

The following example will get the children of the <article> tag.

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

# HTML Content
html = '''
<article>
    <h1>Headline 1</h1>
    <h2>Headline 2</h2>
    <h3>Headline 3</h3>
</article>
'''

# Parse
soup = BeautifulSoup(html, 'html.parser')

# Find <article> tag
article = soup.find('article')

# Print the children of <article>
for child in article.children:
    print(child)

Output:

<h1>Headline 1</h1>

<h2>Headline 2</h2>

<h3>Headline 3</h3>

As you can see, we've got all children of <article> tag.

Get children using the .contents method

the .contents method returns the children of a tag as a list.

Syntax

tag.contents

Example

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

# HTML Content
html = '''
<article>
    <h1>Headline 1</h1>
    <h2>Headline 2</h2>
    <h3>Headline 3</h3>
</article>
'''

# Parse
soup = BeautifulSoup(html, 'html.parser')

# Find <article> tag
article = soup.find('article')

# Print the children of <article> as a list
print(article.contents)

Output:

[<h1>Headline 1</h1>, <h2>Headline 2</h2>, <h3>Headline 3</h3>]

As you can see, we got the children as a list.

The difference between .children and .content

As I said before, the children method returns the output as a generator, and the contents method returns it as a list.

The following example will get the type of the data:

# Parse
soup = BeautifulSoup(html, 'html.parser')

# Find <article> tag
article = soup.find('article')

# Print Type of data
print(type(article.children))
print(type(article.contents))

Output:

<class 'list_iterator'>
<class 'list'>

For more information about the difference between a generator and a list, I recommend you see the following question:

Generator expressions vs. list comprehensions

.children or .contents which one we should use

You should use the .children method for:

• parsing a big data
• iterating over one time

You should use the .contents method for:

• parsing a small data
• iterating over multi times
• using the methods of the list like index ...