Use BeautifulSoup to get a value after a specific tag

Question

I\'m having a very hard time getting BeautifulSoup to scrape some data for me. What\'s the best way to access the date (the actual numbers, 2008) from this code sample? It\'

Answer 1

Find the dt tag by text and find the next dd sibling:

soup.find('div', class_='detail_date').find('dt', text='Date').find_next_sibling('dd').text

The complete code:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

data = """
<div class='dl_item_container clearfix detail_date'>
    <dt>Date</dt>
    <dd>
    2008
    </dd>
</div>
"""

soup = BeautifulSoup(data)
date_field = soup.find('div', class_='detail_date').find('dt', text='Date')
print date_field.find_next_sibling('dd').text.strip()

Prints 2008.