How to Find any Elements by class in Beautifulsoup

To find elements by class in Beautiful Soup, use the find_all() method along with the class_ parameter or CSS selector.

Using .find_all()

To find elements by class, use the find_all() function and specify the class name of the desired elements as a parameter. This is a simple method.

Syntax:

soup.find_all(class_="class_name")

• .find_all(): This method searches the HTML document for elements that match the specified criteria and returns a list.

• class_: This is a parameter used in .find_all() to specify the class name you want to search for.

Now let's see an example:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

# HTML content
html = '''
<div class="example-class">Element 1</div>
<div class="example-class">Element 2</div>
<div class="other-class">Element 3</div>
'''

# Create a BeautifulSoup object
soup = BeautifulSoup(html, 'html.parser')

# Find Elements by class
elements_with_class = soup.find_all(class_='example-class')

# Iterate through the found elements
for element in elements_with_class:
    print(element)

Output:

<div class="example-class">Element 1</div>
<div class="example-class">Element 2</div>

However, in the above example, we find the element that has the class "example-class".

Using CSS Selector

You can also use a CSS selector to find elements with a specific class using .select() method.

Here is the syntax:

soup.select('class_name')

Let's take a look at how to utilize the CSS selector technique:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

# HTML content
html = '''
<div class="example-class">Element 1</div>
<div class="example-class">Element 2</div>
<div class="other-class">Element 3</div>
'''

# Create a BeautifulSoup object
soup = BeautifulSoup(html, 'html.parser')

# Find elements with a specific class
elements_with_class = soup.select('.example-class')

# Iterate through the found elements
for element in elements_with_class:
    print(element)

Note: Remember to use CSS syntax as the select parameter.

Conclusion

In this article, you have learned about two methods for finding elements by their class. One uses the find_all() function with the class name, and the other uses the selector() function.

If you also need to find elements by class and ID, please refer to the article in the link.