Beautiful Soup Using Regex to Find Tags?

yes see docs...

http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/bs3/documentation.html

import re

soup.findAll(re.compile("^a$|(div)"))

find_all() is the most favored method in the Beautiful Soup search API.

You can pass a variation of filters. Also, pass a list to find multiple tags:

>>> soup.find_all(['a', 'div'])

Example:

>>> from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
>>> soup = BeautifulSoup('<html><body><div>asdfasdf</div><p><a>foo</a></p></body></html>')
>>> soup.find_all(['a', 'div'])
[<div>asdfasdf</div>, <a>foo</a>]

Or you can use a regular expression to find tags that contain a or div:

>>> import re
>>> soup.find_all(re.compile("(a|div)"))

Note that you can also use regular expressions to search in attributes of tags. For example:

import re
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

soup.find_all('a', {'href': re.compile(r'crummy\.com/')})

This example finds all <a> tags that link to a website containing the substring 'crummy.com'.

Tags:

Python

Web Scraping

Regex

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