How do you replace specific characters in beautifulSoup?
Question
I'm well aware on how to replace texts in tags using bs4 but how would I actually change a specific character in, say a p-tag, into another character or string enclosed in a b-tag?
An example would be if I wanted to bold/highlight all the j's in a paragraph.
2 answers
solution1
2 ACCPTED 2015-02-14 15:45:43
If you want to insert tags into text, you'll have to break up the whole text into 3 pieces; everything before, the text going into the tag, and everything after.
This has to be done every time you find a match in the text, so you need to keep track of the end piece after insertion too:
def inject_tag(text, start, end, tagname, **attrs):
# find the document root
root = text
while root.parent:
root = root.parent
before = root.new_string(text[:start])
new_tag = root.new_tag(tagname, **attrs)
new_tag.string = text[start:end]
after = root.new_string(text[end:])
text.replace_with(before)
before.insert_after(new_tag)
new_tag.insert_after(after)
return after
Then use the above function to replace specific indices:
>>> import re
>>> from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
>>> soup = BeautifulSoup('''\
... <p>The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog</p>
... ''')
>>> the = re.compile(r'the', flags=re.I)
>>> text = soup.p.string
>>> while True:
... match = the.search(unicode(text))
... if not match: break
... start, stop = match.span()
... text = inject_tag(text, start, stop, 'b')
...
>>> print soup.prettify()
<html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
<p>
<b>
The
</b>
quick brown fox jumps over
<b>
the
</b>
lazy dog
</p>
</body>
</html>
solution2
-1 2015-02-14 15:32:33
You can use find_all() function to get all <p> elements an a regular expession to inject <b> elements for the letter you wish, like:
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import sys
import re
soup = BeautifulSoup(open(sys.argv[1]))
for p in soup.find_all('p'):
p.string = re.sub(r'(r)', r'<b>\1</b>', p.string)
print(soup.prettify(formatter=None))
Note that I use formatter=None to avoid the conversion of HTML entities.
Using this test text:
<div>
<div class="post-text" itemprop="text">
<p>I'm well aware on how to replace texts in tags using bs4 but how would I actually change a specific character in, say a p-tag, into another character or string enclosed in a b-tag?</p>
<p>An example would be if I wanted to bold/highlight all the j's in a paragraph.</p>
</div>
</div>
Run it like:
python script.py infile
That yields:
<html>
<body>
<div>
<div class="post-text" itemprop="text">
<p>
I'm well awa<b>r</b>e on how to <b>r</b>eplace texts in tags using bs4 but how would I actually change a specific cha<b>r</b>acte<b>r</b> in, say a p-tag, into anothe<b>r</b> cha<b>r</b>acte<b>r</b> o<b>r</b> st<b>r</b>ing enclosed in a b-tag?
</p>
<p>
An example would be if I wanted to bold/highlight all the j's in a pa<b>r</b>ag<b>r</b>aph.
</p>
</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>
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