Problem with XML-parsing using Beautiful Soup

Question

When trying to replace some elements in an XML with Beautiful Soup, I found out that I have to use soup.find_all().string.replace_with() to replace the desired elements. However, I came across the problem that the soup.find_all() method only returns elements of type None .

So I tried to break my problem down to an XML that is as basic as possible:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup as BS

xml = """
<xml>
    <test tag="0"/>
    <test tag="1"/>
</xml>"""

soup = BS(xml, 'xml')
for elem in soup.find_all("test"):
    print('Element {} has type {}.'.format(elem, elem.type))

Which gives the exact same thing:

Element <test tag="0"/> has type None.
Element <test tag="1"/> has type None.

I'd be happy, if someone could point out, where the problem lies.

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Well I'm not sure exactly what you're looking for as an output, but you can replace tag attributes the following way:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup as BS

xml = """
<xml>
    <test tag="0"/>
    <test tag="1"/>
</xml>"""

replace_list = ['0']
replacement = '2'

soup = BS(xml, 'xml')
for elem in soup.find_all("test"):
    if elem['tag'] in replace_list:
        elem['tag'] = replacement
    #print('Element {} has type {}.'.format(elem, elem.name))

xml = str(soup)

print (xml)

Output:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<xml>
<test tag="2"/>
<test tag="1"/>
</xml>