How to find all comments with Beautiful Soup
Question
This question was asked four years ago, but the answer is now out of date for BS4.
I want to delete all comments in my html file using beautiful soup. Since BS4 makes each comment as a special type of navigable string , I thought this code would work:
for comments in soup.find_all('comment'):
comments.decompose()
So that didn't work.... How do I find all comments using BS4?
2 answers
solution1
22 ACCPTED 2015-10-15 03:39:12
You can pass a function to find_all() to help it check whether the string is a Comment.
For example I have below html:
<body>
<!-- Branding and main navigation -->
<div class="Branding">The Science & Safety Behind Your Favorite Products</div>
<div class="l-branding">
<p>Just a brand</p>
</div>
<!-- test comment here -->
<div class="block_content">
<a href="https://www.google.com">Google</a>
</div>
</body>
Code:
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup as BS
from bs4 import Comment
....
soup = BS(html, 'html.parser')
comments = soup.find_all(string=lambda text: isinstance(text, Comment))
for c in comments:
print(c)
print("===========")
c.extract()
the output would be:
Branding and main navigation
============
test comment here
============
BTW, I think the reason why find_all('Comment') doesn't work is (from BeautifulSoup document):
Pass in a value for name and you'll tell Beautiful Soup to only consider tags with certain names. Text strings will be ignored , as will tags whose names that don't match.
solution2
11 2015-10-15 03:26:53
Two things I needed to do:
First, when importing Beautiful Soup
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup, Comment
Second, here's the code to extract comments
for comments in soup.findAll(text=lambda text:isinstance(text, Comment)):
comments.extract()
The technical post webpages of this site follow the CC BY-SA 4.0 protocol. If you need to reprint, please indicate the site URL or the original address.Any question please contact:yoyou2525@163.com.