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Beautiful Soup | extract method

Programming

Python

Beautiful Soup

Documentation

Jul 1, 2022

Last updated

local_offer Python●Beautiful Soup

Examples

Consider the following HTML document:


        
        
            
                
                
                    my_html = """
       <div>
              <p>Bob is great</p>
       </div>
"""
soup = BeautifulSoup(my_html)

Removing a tag and its content

To remove the p tag as well as its inner content:


        
        
            
                
                
                    div_tag = soup.find("div")
p_tag = div_tag.find("p")
p_tag.extract()
                
            
            <p>Bob is great</p>

Here, we see <p>Bob is great</p> as the output because the extract() method returns whatever you've removed.

After calling extract() on the p tag, it is no longer part of our parse tree:


        
        
            
                
                
                    print(div_tag)
                
            
            
<div>
</div>

However, the catch is that, although the p tag has been detached from our parse tree, it still exists in memory, and we can still access it:


        
        
            
                
                
                    print(p_tag)
                
            
            <p>Bob is great</p>

If you want to completely remove the p_tag, then call the decompose() method instead of extract().

Removing a string

To remove the inner text of p:


        
        
            
                
                
                    tag_div = soup.find("div")
tag_div.find("p").string.extract()
tag_div
                
            
            <div>
<p></p>
</div>