How to solve an attribute error when using beautifulsoup?

Question

I am reading in a .html file that looks similar to the following format:

html = '''
<tr>
<td class="SmallFormText" colspan="3">hours per response:</td><td class="SmallFormTextR">23.8</td>
</tr>
<hr>
<table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="4" summary="Form 13F-NT Header Information">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td class="FormTextC">COLUMN 1</td><td class="FormTextC">COLUMN 2</td><td class="FormTextC">COLUMN 3</td><td class="FormTextR">COLUMN 4</td><td class="FormTextC" colspan="3">COLUMN 5</td><td class="FormTextC">COLUMN 6</td><td class="FormTextR">COLUMN 7</td><td class="FormTextC" colspan="3">COLUMN 8</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="FormText"></td><td class="FormText"></td><td class="FormText"></td><td class="FormTextR">VALUE</td><td class="FormTextR">SHRS OR</td><td class="FormText">SH/</td><td class="FormText">PUT/</td><td class="FormText">INVESTMENT</td><td class="FormTextR">OTHER</td><td class="FormTextC" colspan="3">VOTING AUTHORITY</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="FormText">NAME OF ISSUER</td><td class="FormText">TITLE OF CLASS</td><td class="FormText">CUSIP</td><td class="FormTextR">(x$1000)</td><td class="FormTextR">PRN AMT</td><td class="FormText">PRN</td><td class="FormText">CALL</td><td class="FormText">DISCRETION</td><td class="FormTextR">MANAGER</td><td class="FormTextR">SOLE</td><td class="FormTextR">SHARED</td><td class="FormTextR">NONE</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="FormData">1ST SOURCE CORP</td><td class="FormData">COM</td><td class="FormData">336901103</td><td class="FormDataR">8</td><td class="FormDataR">335</td><td class="FormData">SH</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td class="FormData">SOLE</td><td class="FormData">7</td><td class="FormDataR">335</td><td class="FormDataR">0</td><td class="FormDataR">0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="FormData">1ST UNITED BANCORP INC FLA</td><td class="FormData">COM</td><td class="FormData">33740N105</td><td class="FormDataR">7</td><td class="FormDataR">989</td><td class="FormData">SH</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td class="FormData">SOLE</td><td class="FormData">7</td><td class="FormDataR">989</td><td class="FormDataR">0</td><td class="FormDataR">0</td>
</tr>    '''

In this code, I am trying to extract the information between the < tr > and < /tr > tags. In particular, I want to assign a given information, such as "NAME OF ISSUER" to a column name called "NAME_OF_ISSUER", using beautiful soup. However, when I run the following code, I am facing an error that looks simple to be solved (it's more or less a data formatting issue). Given that I am new to Python, I got stuck for a few hours trying alternative solutions. I would appreciate any comments or feedback.

Here is my code (please run the above code as well to obtain the html data):

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
soup = BeautifulSoup(html, 'lxml')
rows = soup.find_all('tr')[11:]
positions = []
dic = {}
position = rows.find_all('td')
dic["NAME_OF_ISSUER"] = position[0].text
dic["CUSIP"] = position[2].text
dic["VALUE"] = int(position[3].text.replace(',', ''))*1000
dic["SHARES"] = int(position[4].text.replace(',', ''))
positions.append(dic)
df = pd.DataFrame(positions)

I am getting an "AttributeError" right after defining position, stating that the list object has no attribute "find_all".

What exactly does this mean? Also, how would I need to transform the html data to avoid this issue?

Edited part:

Here is the full stack trace:

position = rows.find_all('td')
Traceback (most recent call last):

  File "<ipython-input-8-37353b5ab2ef>", line 1, in <module>
    position = rows.find_all('td')

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

Answer 1

soup.find_all returns a python list of elements. All you need to do is iterate through the list and grab data from those elements.

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
soup = BeautifulSoup(html, 'lxml')
rows = soup.find_all('tr')

# scan for header row and trim list
for index, row in enumerate(rows):
    cells = row.find_all('td')
    if cells and "NAME OF ISSUER" in cells[0].text.upper():
        del rows[:index+1]
        break

# convert remaining html rows to dict to create dataframe
positions = []
for position in rows:
    dic = {}
    cells = position.find_all('td')
    dic["NAME_OF_ISSUER"] = cells[0].text
    dic["CUSIP"] = cells[2].text
    dic["VALUE"] = int(cells[3].text.replace(',', ''))*1000
    dic["SHARES"] = int(celss[4].text.replace(',', ''))
    positions.append(dic)
df = pd.DataFrame(positions)