How to get the first child of a beautifulSoup document ?

***snippsat*** · Jun-08-2020, 06:21 PM

The doc about this .contents and .children.

Here a working test setup.

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

html = '''\
<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
  <meta charset="utf-8">
  <title>The HTML5</title>
</head>
<body>
  <tag1>
    <tag2 name="tag2">
      <tag3 name="Korea">Closed</tag3><br>
      <tag3 name="China">A Big contry</tag3><br>
      <tag3 name="Japan">Nippon</tag3><br>
    </tag2>
  </tag1>
</body>
</html>'''

soup = BeautifulSoup(html, 'lxml')

Usage test:

>>> for elem in soup.children:
...     print(elem)
...     
html
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8"/>
<title>The HTML5</title>
</head>
<body>
<tag1>
<tag2 name="tag 2">
<tag3 name="Korea"></tag3>Closed<br/>
<tag3 name="China"></tag3>A Big contry<br/>
<tag3 name="Japan"></tag3>Nippon<br/>
</tag2>
</tag1>
</body>
</html>

So it works as expected when use children on soup object.

Find a tag then use children.

>>> tag_1 = soup.find('tag1')
>>> for elem in tag_1.children:
...     print(elem)
... 

<tag2 name="tag2">
<tag3 name="Korea">Closed</tag3><br/>
<tag3 name="China">A Big contry</tag3><br/>
<tag3 name="Japan">Nippon</tag3><br/>
</tag2>

I don't remember last i used children,so it's not much used.

One more using CSS selector which is powerful and often forgotten.

>>> find_china = soup.select_one('tag3:nth-child(3)')
>>> find_china
<tag3 name="China">A Big contry</tag3>
>>> find_china.text
'A Big contry'

How to get the first child of a beautifulSoup document ?

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