How to get BeautifulSoup 4 to respect a self-closing tag?

Question

This question is specific to BeautifulSoup4 , which makes it different from the previous questions:

Why is BeautifulSoup modifying my self-closing elements?

Since BeautifulStoneSoup is gone (the previous xml parser), how can I get bs4 to respect a new self-closing tag? For example:

import bs4   
S = '''<foo> <bar a="3"/> </foo>'''
soup = bs4.BeautifulSoup(S, selfClosingTags=['bar'])

print soup.prettify()

Does not self-close the bar tag, but gives a hint. What is this tree builder that bs4 is referring to and how to I self-close the tag?

/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/bs4/__init__.py:112: UserWarning: BS4 does not respect the selfClosingTags argument to the BeautifulSoup constructor. The tree builder is responsible for understanding self-closing tags.
  "BS4 does not respect the selfClosingTags argument to the "
<html>
 <body>
  <foo>
   <bar a="3">
   </bar>
  </foo>
 </body>
</html>

Answer 1

To parse XML you pass in “xml” as the second argument to the BeautifulSoup constructor.

soup = bs4.BeautifulSoup(S, 'xml')

You'll need to have lxml installed.

You don't need to pass selfClosingTags anymore:

In [1]: import bs4
In [2]: S = '''<foo> <bar a="3"/> </foo>'''
In [3]: soup = bs4.BeautifulSoup(S, 'xml')
In [4]: print soup.prettify()
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<foo>
 <bar a="3"/>
</foo>

How to get BeautifulSoup 4 to respect a self-closing tag?

Question

1 answers

solution1
12 ACCPTED 2013-02-19 15:51:11

How to get BeautifulSoup 4 to respect a self-closing tag?

Question

1 answers

solution1 12 ACCPTED 2013-02-19 15:51:11

solution1
12 ACCPTED 2013-02-19 15:51:11