BeautifulSoup: Get and Check Type Of Element

In this tutorial, we'll learn how to get and check the element type in BeautifulSoup.

Get the type of element

To get the type of an element using Beautiful Soup, you can follow this syntax:

type(element)

Let's see an example:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

# html source
html = """
<div>
<h1 class="el">This is H1</h1>
<h2 class="el">This is H2</h2>
<h3 class="el">This is H3</h3>
<div>
"""

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

# Find all with "el" class
els = soup.find_all(class_="el")

# Print Element type
for el in els:
      print(type(el))

This code:

1. Finds all elements with the class "el" by using soup.find_all(class_="el").
2. Prints the type of each element using print(type(el)).

Here is the output:

<class 'bs4.element.Tag'>
<class 'bs4.element.Tag'>
<class 'bs4.element.Tag'>

So, when you see <class 'bs4.element.Tag'> as the output of type(element), it confirms that the element is a Tag object from Beautiful Soup, which you can further interact with using the available methods and attributes provided by Beautiful Soup.

Check the type of element

To check the type of element in Beautiful Soup, you can utilize the isinstance() function in combination with the Tag class provided by Beautiful Soup. Here's the syntax:

if isinstance(element, Tag):
    print("Element is a Tag.")
else:
    print("Element is not a Tag.")

the isinstance() returns True if the element is a Tag object and False otherwise.

Let's see an example:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
from bs4.element import Tag

# HTML source
html = """
<div>
  <h1>This is a heading</h1>
  <p>This is a paragraph</p>
</div>
"""

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

# Find the first <h1> element
element = soup.find('h1')

# Check the type of element
if isinstance(element, Tag):
    print("Element is a Tag.")
else:
    print("Element is not a Tag.")

Output:

Element is a Tag.

In this example, the code:

1. Finds for the first <h1> element using soup.find('h1').
2. checks the type of the element using isinstance(element, Tag).

Since the element is indeed a Tag object, it prints "Element is a Tag."

Conclusion

In conclusion, By using the type() function, you can determine the of an element, which is typically <class 'bs4.element.Tag'>. And, by using isinstance() function in combination with the Tag class you can check if an element belongs to the Tag class.