CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonhtmlbeautifulsoup
PythonIsBae
PythonIsBae

Reputation: 358

str.replace returns ValueError beautiful soup

I have the following html:

<body><h3>Full Results for race 376338</h3>"Category","Position","Name","Time","Team"<br>"A","1","James","20:20:00","5743"<br><br>"A","2","Matt","20:15:00"<br>

It continues like <br> # some text <br> for hundreds of rows. I want to create a new line at each
, so it is in CSV format like this:

<body><h3>Full Results for race 376338</h3>"Category","Position","Name","Time","Team"
<br>"A","1","James","20:20:00","5743"<br>
<br>"A","2","Matt","20:15:00"<br>

and I have this code:

soup = BeautifulSoup(html_string, features="html.parser")

    for br in soup.find_all('br'):
        soup.replace_with("\n")

With this I get the error: ValueError: Cannot replace one element with another when the element to be replaced is not part of a tree. What do I need to change?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 149

Answers (1)

wwii
wwii

Reputation: 23753

You want the text attribute.

In [15]: soup.text
Out[15]: 'Full Results for race 376338"Category","Position","Name","Time","Team"\n"A","1","James","20:20:00","5743"\n"A","2","Matt","20:15:00"'

In [16]: soup.text.split()
Out[16]: 
['Full',
 'Results',
 'for',
 'race',
 '376338"Category","Position","Name","Time","Team"',
 '"A","1","James","20:20:00","5743"',
 '"A","2","Matt","20:15:00"']

In [17]: soup.text.split()[4:]
Out[17]: 
['376338"Category","Position","Name","Time","Team"',
 '"A","1","James","20:20:00","5743"',
 '"A","2","Matt","20:15:00"']

Or the get_text method.

In [24]: soup.get_text()
Out[24]: 'Full Results for race 376338"Category","Position","Name","Time","Team"\n"A","1","James","20:20:00","5743"\n"A","2","Matt","20:15:00"'

Or 

In [25]: [text for text in soup.stripped_strings]
Out[25]: 
['Full Results for race 376338',
 '"Category","Position","Name","Time","Team"',
 '"A","1","James","20:20:00","5743"',
 '"A","2","Matt","20:15:00"']

Those last two are straight from the documentation.

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions