BeautifulSoup Grab Visible Webpage Text

Solution 1:

Try this:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
from bs4.element import Comment
import urllib.request


def tag_visible(element):
    if element.parent.name in ['style', 'script', 'head', 'title', 'meta', '[document]']:
        return False
    if isinstance(element, Comment):
        return False
    return True


def text_from_html(body):
    soup = BeautifulSoup(body, 'html.parser')
    texts = soup.findAll(text=True)
    visible_texts = filter(tag_visible, texts)  
    return u" ".join(t.strip() for t in visible_texts)

html = urllib.request.urlopen('http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/21/us/21storm.html').read()
print(text_from_html(html))

Solution 2:

The approved answer from @jbochi does not work for me. The str() function call raises an exception because it cannot encode the non-ascii characters in the BeautifulSoup element. Here is a more succinct way to filter the example web page to visible text.

html = open('21storm.html').read()
soup = BeautifulSoup(html)
[s.extract() for s in soup(['style', 'script', '[document]', 'head', 'title'])]
visible_text = soup.getText()