Beautiful Soup [Python] and the extracting of text in a table

Question

i am new to Python and to Beatiful Soup also! I heard about BS. It is told to be a great tool to parse and extract content. So here i am...:

I want to take the content

Answer 1

Use "text" to get text between "td"

1) First read table DOM using tag or ID

soup = BeautifulSoup(self.driver.page_source, "html.parser")
htnm_migration_table = soup.find("table", {'id':'htnm_migration_table'})

2) Read tbody

tbody = htnm_migration_table.find('tbody')

3) Read all tr from tbody tag

trs = tbody.find_all('tr')

4) get all tds using tr

for tr in trs:
      tds = tr.find_all('td')
      for td in tds:
      print(td.text)

Answer 2

I find Beautiful Soup very efficient tool so keep learning it :-) It is able to parse a page with invalid markup so it should be able to handle the page you refer. You may want to use command BeautifulSoup(html).prettify() command if you want to get a valid reformatted page source with valid markup.

As for your question, the result of your first soup.findAll(...) command is also a Beautiful Soup object and you can make a second search in it, like this:

table_soup = soup.findAll('table' ,attrs={'class':'bp_ergebnis_tab_info'})
your_sample_text = table_soup.find("td").renderContents().strip()

print your_sample_text

Answer 3

First find the table (as you are doing). Using find rather than findall returns the first item in the list (rather than returning a list of all finds - in which case we'd have to add an extra [0] to take the first element of the list):

table = soup.find('table' ,attrs={'class':'bp_ergebnis_tab_info'})

Then use find again to find the first td:

first_td = table.find('td')

Then use renderContents() to extract the textual contents:

text = first_td.renderContents()

... and the job is done (though you may also want to use strip() to remove leading and trailing spaces:

trimmed_text = text.strip()

This should give:

>>> print trimmed_text
This is a sample text
>>>

as desired.