CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonhtmlbeautifulsoup
Juicy
Juicy

Reputation: 12500

Remove tag from text with BeautifulSoup

A lot of questions here with similar title but I'm trying to remove the tag from the soup object itself.

I have a page that contains among other things this div: 

<div id="content">
I want to keep this<br /><div id="blah">I want to remove this</div>
</div>

I can select <div id="content"> with soup.find('div', id='content') but I want to remove the <div id="blah"> from it.

Upvotes: 11

Views: 18930

Answers (2)

unutbu
unutbu

Reputation: 879083

The Tag.decompose method removes tag from the tree. So find the div tag:

div = soup.find('div', {'id':'content'})

Loop over all the children but the first:

for child in list(div)[1:]:

and try to decompose the children:

    try:
        child.decompose()
    except AttributeError: pass

import bs4 as bs

content = '''<div id="content">
I want to keep this<br /><div id="blah">I want to remove this</div>
</div>'''
soup = bs.BeautifulSoup(content)
div = soup.find('div', {'id':'content'})
for child in list(div)[1:]:
    try:
        child.decompose()
    except AttributeError: pass
print(div)

yields

<div id="content">
I want to keep this
</div>

The equivalent using lxml would be

import lxml.html as LH

content = '''<div id="content">
I want to keep this<br /><div id="blah">I want to remove this</div>
</div>'''
root = LH.fromstring(content)

div = root.xpath('//div[@id="content"]')[0]
for child in div:
    div.remove(child)
print(LH.tostring(div))

Upvotes: 8

Sede
Sede

Reputation: 61225

You can use extract if you want to remove a tag or string from the tree.

In [13]: soup = BeautifulSoup("""<div id="content">
I want to keep this<br /><div id="blah">I want to remove this</div>
</div>""")

In [14]: soup = BeautifulSoup("""<div id="content">
   ....: I want to keep this<br /><div id="blah">I want to remove this</div>
   ....: </div>""")

In [15]: blah = soup.find(id='blah')

In [16]: _ = blah.extract()

In [17]: soup
Out[17]: 
<html><body><div id="content">
I want to keep this<br/>
</div></body></html>

Upvotes: 12

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