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Beautiful Soup | previous_siblings property

schedule Aug 10, 2023
Last updated
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PythonBeautiful Soup
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In Beautiful Soup, the previous_siblings property of a tag or a string returns a generator used to iterate over all the previous tags and strings under the same parent.

Examples

Consider the following HTML document:

my_html = """
<div>
<p>Alex</p>
<p id="bob">Bob</p>
</div>
"""
soup = BeautifulSoup(my_html)

Let's get the previous_siblings of <p id="bob">Bob</p>:

p_bob = soup.find(id="bob")
for s in p_bob.previous_siblings:
print(repr(s))
'\n'
<p>Alex</p>
'\n

Here, we've used the repr(~) method to escape the newline character so that you can explicitly see '\n' instead of an empty line. To break this down, the previous_sibling of <p id="bob">Bob</p> is a newline character, which might be surprising for those who expected to see <p>Alex</p>. Such a result arises because there is a new line character \n between <p>Alex</p> and <p id="bob">Bob</p>.

If you just wanted to access the previous sibling elements, then the better alternative would be to call the find_previous_siblings() method:

p_bob = soup.find(id="bob")
for s in p_bob.find_previous_siblings():
print(s)
<p>Alex</p>
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Published by Isshin Inada
Edited by 0 others
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