Find tags by CSS class using BeautifulSoup

Last Updated : 12 Jan, 2024

BeautifulSoup is a Python library for pulling data out of HTML and XML files. When working with HTML documents, we often need to extract specific elements based on their CSS classes. In this article, we will discuss how to find tags by CSS using BeautifulSoup. We are given an HTML document, we need to find and extract tags from the document using the CSS class.

Examples

HTML Document:
<html>
<head>
    <title> Geeksforgeeks </title>
</head>
<body>
    <div class="ext" >Extract this tag</div>
</body>
</html>
Output:
<div class="ext" >Extract this tag</div>

Required Modules

bs4: It is a Python library used to scrape data from HTML, XML, and other markup languages.
Make sure you have pip installed on your system. Run the following command in the terminal to install this library-

pip install bs4
or
pip install beautifulsoup4

Find Tags by CSS Class Using BeautifulSoup

Below are the ways by which we can find tags using BeautifulSoup in Python:

Using find() method
Using find_all() function
Using Regular Expressions
Using the User-Defined function
From a Website

Example 1: Find the Tag Using find() Method

In this example, a function find_tags_from_class is defined to parse an HTML document using BeautifulSoup and extract a specific <div> tag with a given CSS class. The function is called with a sample HTML string to demonstrate the extraction process.

Python3

# Import Module
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
 
# HTML Document
HTML_DOC = """
              <html>
               <head>
                   <title> Geeksforgeeks </title>
               </head>
               <body>
                   <div class="ext" >Extract this tag</div>
               </body>
             </html>
            """
 
# Function to find tags
def find_tags_from_class(html):
 
    # parse html content
    soup = BeautifulSoup(html, "html.parser")
 
    # find tags by CSS class
    div = soup.find("div", class_= "ext")
 
    # Print the extracted tag
    print(div)
 
# Function Call
find_tags_from_class(HTML_DOC)

Output:

Example 2: Find All the Tags Using find_all() Method

In this example, a function find_tags_from_class is defined to parse an HTML table using BeautifulSoup and extract all <td> tags with a specific CSS class “table-row”. The function iterates through the extracted tags and prints each row to the console.

Python3

# Import Module
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
 
# HTML Document
HTML_DOC = """
              <html>
               <head>
                   <title> Table Data </title>
               </head>
               <body>
                <table>
                   <tr>
                    <td class = "table-row"> This is row 1 </td>
                    <td class = "table-row"> This is row 2 </td>
                    <td class = "table-row"> This is row 3 </td>
                    <td class = "table-row"> This is row 4 </td>
                    <td class = "table-row"> This is row 5 </td>
                   </tr>
                </table>
               </body>
             </html>
            """
 
# Function to find tags
def find_tags_from_class(html):
 
    # parse html content
    soup = BeautifulSoup(html, "html.parser")
 
    # find tags by CSS class
    rows = soup.find_all("td", class_= "table-row")
 
    # Print the extracted tag
    for row in rows:
        print(row)
 
# Function Call
find_tags_from_class(HTML_DOC)

Output

Example 3: Finding Tags by CSS class Using Regular Expressions

In this example, a function find_tags_from_class is defined to parse an HTML table using BeautifulSoup and extract all <td> tags whose CSS class names end with “row” using a regular expression pattern. The function iterates through the extracted tags and prints each row to the console.

Python3

# Import Module
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import re
 
# HTML Document
HTML_DOC = """
              <html>
               <head>
                   <title> Table Data </title>
               </head>
               <body>
                <table>
                   <tr>
                    <td class = "table"> This is row 1 </td>
                    <td class = "table-row"> This is row 2 </td>
                    <td class = "table"> This is row 3 </td>
                    <td class = "table-row"> This is row 4 </td>
                    <td class = "table"> This is row 5 </td>
                   </tr>
                </table>
               </body>
             </html>
            """
 
# Function to find tags
def find_tags_from_class(html):
 
    # parse html content
    soup = BeautifulSoup(html, "html.parser")
 
    # find tags by CSS class using regular expressions
    # $ is used to match pattern ending with
    # Here we are finding class that ends with "row"
    rows = soup.find_all("td", class_= re.compile("row$"))
 
    # Print the extracted tag
    for row in rows:
        print(row)
 
# Function Call
find_tags_from_class(HTML_DOC)

Output

Explanation

<td class="table-row"> This is row 2 </td>
<td class="table-row"> This is row 4 </td>

Above two tags class name ends with “row”. Therefore, they are extracted. Other tags class name doesn’t end with “row”. Therefore, they are not extracted.

Example 4: Finding Tags by CSS Class Using the User-Defined Function

In this example, a user-defined function has_three_characters is defined to check if a CSS class name is not None and has a length of 3 characters. The function find_tags_from_class parses an HTML table using BeautifulSoup and extracts all <td> tags based on the condition specified by the user-defined function. The function then iterates through the extracted tags and prints each valid row to the console.

Python3

# Import Module
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
 
# HTML Document
HTML_DOC = """
              <html>
               <head>
                   <title> Table Data </title>
               </head>
               <body>
                <table>
                   <tr>
                    <td class = "table"> This is invalid because len(table) != 3 </td>
                    <td class = "row"> This is valid because len(row) == 3 </td>
                    <td class = "data"> This is invalid because len(data) != 3 </td>
                    <td class = "hii"> This is valid because len(hii) == 3 </td>
                    <td> This is invalid because class is None </td>
                   </tr>
                </table>
               </body>
             </html>
            """
 
# Returns true if the css_class is not None
# and length of css_class is equal to 3
# else returns false
def has_three_characters(css_class):
    return css_class is not None and len(css_class) == 3
 
 
# Function to find tags
def find_tags_from_class(html):
 
    # parse html content
    soup = BeautifulSoup(html, "html.parser")
 
    # find tags by CSS class using user-defined function
    rows = soup.find_all("td", class_= has_three_characters)
 
    # Print the extracted tag
    for row in rows:
        print(row)
 
# Function Call
find_tags_from_class(HTML_DOC)

Output:

Example 5: Finding Tags by CSS Class from a Website

In this example, the requests module is used to fetch the HTML content of the GeeksforGeeks website. The function find_tags_from_class parses the fetched HTML content using BeautifulSoup with the ‘html5lib’ parser and extracts a specific <div> tag with the CSS class “article–container_content”. The extracted tag is then printed to the console.

Python3

# Import Module
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests
 
# Assign website
import requests 
URL = "https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/"
HTML_DOC = requests.get(URL)
 
# Function to find tags
def find_tags_from_class(html):
 
    # parse html content
    soup = BeautifulSoup(html.content, "html5lib")
 
    # find tags by CSS class
    div = soup.find("div", class_= "article--container_content")
 
    # Print the extracted tag
    print(div)
 
# Function Call
find_tags_from_class(HTML_DOC)

Output:

BeautifulSoup - Find tags by CSS class with CSS Selectors

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Article Tags :

Practice Tags :

python

Find tags by CSS class using BeautifulSoup

Find Tags by CSS Class Using BeautifulSoup

Example 1: Find the Tag Using find() Method

Python3

Example 2: Find All the Tags Using find_all() Method

Python3

Example 3: Finding Tags by CSS class Using Regular Expressions

Python3

Example 4: Finding Tags by CSS Class Using the User-Defined Function

Python3

Example 5: Finding Tags by CSS Class from a Website

Python3

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