Printing Only Outer Tags In HTML Code Using BeautifulSoup

August 18, 2022 Post a Comment

Part of whole HTML code looks as follows

Solution 1:

You could set the string attribute to an empty string (''):

html = """
<td class="col2">
<a class="reserve" data-target="#myModal" data-toggle="modal"     
href="example.com" rel="nofollow"></a></td>
"""
soup = BeautifulSoup(html)
x = soup.find('td', class_='col2')
x.string = ''
print(x)

Output

<td class="col2"></td>

Here is what documentation tells about it:

If you set a tag's .string attribute, the tag's contents are replaced with the string you give

Be careful: if the tag contained other tags, they and all their contents will be destroyed.

Solution 2:

You can extract all elements inside td.col2 with extract() function:

data = '''
<td class="col2">
<a class="reserve" data-target="#myModal" data-toggle="modal"
href="example.com" rel="nofollow"></a></td>'''

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

soup = BeautifulSoup(data, 'lxml')

for td in soup.select('td.col2'):
    for t in td.select('*'):
        t.extract()
    print(td)