Python – Using BeautifulSoup to find a HTML tag that contains certain text

beautifulsouphtml-content-extractionpythonregex

I'm trying to get the elements in an HTML doc that contain the following pattern of text: #\S{11}

<h2> this is cool #12345678901 </h2>

So, the previous would match by using:

soup('h2',text=re.compile(r' #\S{11}'))

And the results would be something like:

[u'blahblah #223409823523', u'thisisinteresting #293845023984']

I'm able to get all the text that matches (see line above). But I want the parent element of the text to match, so I can use that as a starting point for traversing the document tree. In this case, I'd want all the h2 elements to return, not the text matches.

Ideas?

Best Answer

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
import re

html_text = """
<h2>this is cool #12345678901</h2>
<h2>this is nothing</h2>
<h1>foo #126666678901</h1>
<h2>this is interesting #126666678901</h2>
<h2>this is blah #124445678901</h2>
"""

soup = BeautifulSoup(html_text)


for elem in soup(text=re.compile(r' #\S{11}')):
    print elem.parent

Prints:

<h2>this is cool #12345678901</h2>
<h2>this is interesting #126666678901</h2>
<h2>this is blah #124445678901</h2>
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