How to change tag name with BeautifulSoup?

Solution 1:

I don't know how you're accessing tag but the following works for me:

import BeautifulSoup

if __name__ == "__main__":
    data = """
<html>
<h2 class='someclass'>some title</h2>
<ul>
   <li>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit.</li>
   <li>Aliquam tincidunt mauris eu risus.</li>
   <li>Vestibulum auctor dapibus neque.</li>
</ul>
</html>

    """
    soup = BeautifulSoup.BeautifulSoup(data)
    h2 = soup.find('h2')
    h2.name = 'h1'
    print soup

Output of print soup command is:

<html>
<h1 class='someclass'>some title</h1>
<ul>
<li>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit.</li>
<li>Aliquam tincidunt mauris eu risus.</li>
<li>Vestibulum auctor dapibus neque.</li>
</ul>
</html>

As you can see, h2 became h1. And nothing else in the document changed. I am using Python 2.6 and BeautifulSoup 3.2.0.

If you have more than one h2 and you want to change them all, you could simple do:

soup = BeautifulSoup.BeautifulSoup(your_data)
while True: 
    h2 = soup.find('h2')
    if not h2:
        break
    h2.name = 'h1'

Solution 2:

It's just:

tag.name = 'new_name'