How to Beautiful Soup (bs4) match just one, and only one, css class

Question

I am using following code to match all div that have CSS class \"ad_item\".

soup.find_all(\'div\',class_=\"ad_item\")

problem that I have i

Answer 1

You can always write a Python function that matches the tag you want, and pass that function into find_all():

def match(tag):
    return (
        tag.name == 'div'
        and 'ad_item' in tag.get('class')
        and 'ad_ex_item' not in tag.get('class'))

soup.find_all(match)

Answer 2

soup.fetch('div',{'class':'add_item'})

Answer 3

You can use strict conditions like this:

soup.select("div[class='ad_item']")

That catch div with exact class. In this case with only 'ad_item' and no others joined by spaces classes.

Answer 4

I have found one solution, although it have nothing to do with BS4, it is pure python code.

for item in soup.find_all('div',class_="ad_item"):
     if len(item["class"]) != 1:
         continue;

It basically skip item, if there is more than one CSS class.

Answer 5

The top answer is correct but if you want a way to keep the for loop clean or like one line solutions then use the list comprehension below.

data = [item for item in soup.find_all("div", class_="ad_item") if len(item["class"]) == 1] 

Answer 6

Did you try to use select : http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/bs4/doc/#css-selectors

soup.select(".add_item")

Unfortunately, it seems that the :not selector of CSS3 is not supported. If you really need this, you may have to look at lxml. It seems to support it. see http://packages.python.org/cssselect/#supported-selectors