Depth First Traversal on BeautifulSoup Parse Tree

mytag.find_all() already does that:

If you call mytag.find_all(), Beautiful Soup will examine all the descendants of mytag: its children, its children’s children, and so on

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup  # pip install beautifulsoup4

soup = BeautifulSoup("""<!doctype html>
<div id=a>A
  <div id=1>A1</div>
  <div id=2>A2</div>
</div>
<div id=b>B
  <div id=I>BI</div>
  <div id=II>BII</div>
</div>
""")

for div in soup.find_all("div", recursive=True):
    print(div.get('id'))

Output

a
1
2
b
I
II

The output confirms that, it is a depth first traversal.

Old Beautiful Soup 3 answer:

recursiveChildGenerator() already does that:

soup = BeautifulSoup.BeautifulSoup(html)
for child in soup.recursiveChildGenerator():
     name = getattr(child, "name", None)
     if name is not None:
         print name
     elif not child.isspace(): # leaf node, don't print spaces
         print child

Output

For the html from @msalvadores's answer:

html
ul
li
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit.
li
Aliquam tincidunt mauris eu risus.
li
Vestibulum auctor dapibus neque.
html

NOTE: html is printed twice due to the example contains two opening <html> tags.


I think you can use the method "childGenerator" and recursively use this one to parse the tree in a DFT fashion.

def recursiveChildren(x):
   if "childGenerator" in dir(x):
      for child in x.childGenerator():
          name = getattr(child, "name", None)
          if name is not None:
             print "[Container Node]",child.name
          recursiveChildren(child)
    else:
       if not x.isspace(): #Just to avoid printing "\n" parsed from document.
          print "[Terminal Node]",x

if __name__ == "__main__":
    soup = BeautifulSoup(your_data)
    for child in soup.childGenerator():
        recursiveChildren(child)

With "childGenerator" in dir(x) we make sure that an element is a container, terminal nodes such as NavigableStrings are not containers and do not contain children.

For some example HTML like:

<html>
<ul>
   <li>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit.</li>
   <li>Aliquam tincidunt mauris eu risus.</li>
   <li>Vestibulum auctor dapibus neque.</li>
</ul>
</html>

This scripts prints ...

[Container Node] ul
[Container Node] li
[Terminal Node] Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit.
[Container Node] li
[Terminal Node] Aliquam tincidunt mauris eu risus.
[Container Node] li
[Terminal Node] Vestibulum auctor dapibus neque.

Tags:

Python

Beautifulsoup

Tree Traversal

Recent Posts