Beautiful Soup: 'ResultSet' object has no attribute 'find_all'?

Question

I am trying to scrape a simple table using Beautiful Soup. Here is my code:

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

url = 'https://gist.githubusercontent.com/anonymous/c8eedd8bf41098a8940b/raw/c7e01a76d753f6e8700b54821e26ee5dde3199ab/gistfile1.txt'
r = requests.get(url)

soup = BeautifulSoup(r.text)
table = soup.find_all(class_='dataframe')

first_name = []
last_name = []
age = []
preTestScore = []
postTestScore = []

for row in table.find_all('tr'):
    col = table.find_all('td')

    column_1 = col[0].string.strip()
    first_name.append(column_1)

    column_2 = col[1].string.strip()
    last_name.append(column_2)

    column_3 = col[2].string.strip()
    age.append(column_3)

    column_4 = col[3].string.strip()
    preTestScore.append(column_4)

    column_5 = col[4].string.strip()
    postTestScore.append(column_5)

columns = {'first_name': first_name, 'last_name': last_name, 'age': age, 'preTestScore': preTestScore, 'postTestScore': postTestScore}
df = pd.DataFrame(columns)
df

However, whenever I run it, I get this error:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
AttributeError                            Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-116-a900c2872793> in <module>()
     14 postTestScore = []
     15 
---> 16 for row in table.find_all('tr'):
     17     col = table.find_all('td')
     18 

AttributeError: 'ResultSet' object has no attribute 'find_all'

I have read around a dozen StackOverflow questions about this error, and I cannot figure out what I am doing wrong.

Answer 1

The table variable contains an array. You would need to call find_all on its members (even though you know it's an array with only one member), not on the entire thing.

>>> type(table)
<class 'bs4.element.ResultSet'>
>>> type(table[0])
<class 'bs4.element.Tag'>
>>> len(table[0].find_all('tr'))
6
>>>

Answer 2

 table = soup.find_all(class_='dataframe') 

This gives you a result set – ie all the elements that match the class. You can either iterate over them or, if you know you only have one dataFrame , you can use find instead. From your code it seems the latter is what you need, to deal with the immediate problem:

table = soup.find(class_='dataframe')

However, that is not all:

for row in table.find_all('tr'):
    col = table.find_all('td')

You probably want to iterate over the td s in the row here, rather than the whole table. (Otherwise you'll just see the first row over and over.)

for row in table.find_all('tr'):
    for col in row.find_all('td'):

Answer 3

Iterate over table and use rowfind_all('td')

   for row in table:
        col = row.find_all('td')