Get an attribute value based on the name attribute with BeautifulSoup

Solution 1:

It's pretty simple, use the following -

>>> from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
>>> soup = BeautifulSoup('<META NAME="City" content="Austin">')
>>> soup.find("meta", {"name":"City"})
<meta name="City" content="Austin" />
>>> soup.find("meta", {"name":"City"})['content']
u'Austin'

Leave a comment if anything is not clear.

Solution 2:

theharshest answered the question but here is another way to do the same thing. Also, In your example you have NAME in caps and in your code you have name in lowercase.

s = '<div class="question" id="get attrs" name="python" x="something">Hello World</div>'
soup = BeautifulSoup(s)

attributes_dictionary = soup.find('div').attrs
print attributes_dictionary
# prints: {'id': 'get attrs', 'x': 'something', 'class': ['question'], 'name': 'python'}

print attributes_dictionary['class'][0]
# prints: question

print soup.find('div').get_text()
# prints: Hello World

Solution 3:

6 years late to the party but I've been searching for how to extract an html element's tag attribute value, so for:

<span property="addressLocality">Ayr</span>

I want "addressLocality". I kept being directed back here, but the answers didn't really solve my problem.

How I managed to do it eventually:

>>> from bs4 import BeautifulSoup as bs

>>> soup = bs('<span property="addressLocality">Ayr</span>', 'html.parser')
>>> my_attributes = soup.find().attrs
>>> my_attributes
{u'property': u'addressLocality'}

As it's a dict, you can then also use keys and 'values'

>>> my_attributes.keys()
[u'property']
>>> my_attributes.values()
[u'addressLocality']

Hopefully it helps someone else!

Solution 4:

theharshest's answer is the best solution, but FYI the problem you were encountering has to do with the fact that a Tag object in Beautiful Soup acts like a Python dictionary. If you access tag['name'] on a tag that doesn't have a 'name' attribute, you'll get a KeyError.