CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonbeautifulsoup
Michael McIntyre
Michael McIntyre

Reputation: 225

Combining Beautiful Soup find_all list into one element

I have created a script that parses through emails on a weekly basis looking for tables within specific emails. I know that I want things that are within a table tag with a specific class name. The goal then is to take those tables, essentially concat them with a
tag in between, and put into another email to automatically send every week.

What I have so far is the actual email scraping, the sending of the email at the end, but I just don't know how to combine the results of a find_all into one element. I'm obviously open to different approaches, which is why I posed the question as thus.

What I have for code is this: 

def parse_messages(enhance_str):
    soup = BeautifulSoup(enhance_str, 'html.parser')
    table = soup.find_all('table', {'class': 'MsoNormalTable'})
    return table

which gives me a list-like object (I know find_all sub classes list), but any list methods I know don't work with this object. I thought I could just do something like

'<br/>'.join(table)

but this throws an attribute error.

I'm sure there is a simple answer, but I can't see it. Any help is greatly appreciated.

EDIT: As a clarifcation, I was just trying to preserve the html structure of these tables so I can just pop them into a new email and send them as is. The solution below works for me, so I'm marking it as the accepted answer.

Thanks for the help!

Upvotes: 2

Views: 1942

Answers (1)

heemayl
heemayl

Reputation: 42017

The elements in the output list of soup.find_all are bs4.element.Tag objects, not some objects you can join together as-is to make a string.

I'm not sure what you're upto but if you want to make them all a single str, you can iterate over the Tags, call str on them to get the string representation and then join:

'<br/>'.join([str(tag) for tag in table])

Upvotes: 4

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