How to Get href of Element using BeautifulSoup [Easily]

To get the href attribute of <a> tag, use the following syntax:

tag.get('href')

The get('href') method returns the value of the href attribute of the anchor tag.

By using the above syntax, we'll learn how to:

• Get the href attribute of a tag
• Get the href attribute of all tags

Get the href attribute of a tag

In the following example, we'll see how to use get('href'):

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

# HTML content
html = '''
<a href="/python/string">Python string</a>
'''

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

# Find the 'a' tag
link_tag = soup.find('a')

# Extract the 'href' attribute value
href_value = link_tag.get('href')

print("HREF:", href_value)

Output:

HREF: /python/string

In the above example, we use the find() method to find the first <a> tag. Then, we use the .get() method on the link_tag object to get the href attribute's value.

Get the href attribute of all tags

You can use the find_all() method to find all of the anchor tags and iterate through the results to get the href attribute of each anchor tag.

Here is an example:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

# HTML content
html = '''
 <a href="/python/string">Python string</a> 
 <a href="/javascript/array">JavaScript array</a> 
'''

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

# Find all anchor tags
link_tags = soup.find_all('a')

# Loop through each anchor tag
for tag in link_tags:
    # Get the value of the 'href' attribute
    href = tag.get('href')
    
    # Print the 'href' attribute value
    print(href)

Output:

/python/string
/javascript/array

Conclusion

In the end, we learned how to get the href value of a <a> tag by using the get('href') with find() methods.

We've also learned how to use the get('href') and find_all() methods to get the href of all <a> tags.