What function in beautifulsoup will remove a tag from the html tree and destroy it?

When it comes to web scraping with Python, not many libraries can surpass BeautifulSoup in terms of features and ease of use. It can help you save yourself a few hours, or even days of work using just a few lines of code.

Using BeautifulSoup, HTML documents are parsed into a tree, which contains tags or text.In this article, we will show you how to remove a HTML tag in BeautifulSoup.

BeautifulSoup has a built in method called extract() that allows you to remove a tag or string from the tree. Once you’ve located the element you want to get rid of, let’s say it’s named i_tag, calling i_tag.extract() will remove the element and return it at the same time.

markup = 'I linked to example.com' soup = BeautifulSoup(markup, 'html.parser') a_tag = soup.a i_tag = soup.i.extract() a_tag # I linked to i_tag # example.com print(i_tag.parent) # None

Code language: Python (python)

Please do note that the element returned is a bs4.Tag or bs4.NavigableString, not a Python string. The original BeautifulSoup object is now modified. If you try to find the original i_tag, it won’t be found.

In case you don’t care about the content of the tag and just want to destroy it completely, use BeautifulSoup decompose() method. Once called, i_tag.decompose() will remove i_tag and its contents from the BeautifulSoup tree completely without returning anything.

markup = 'I linked to example.com' soup = BeautifulSoup(markup, 'html.parser') a_tag = soup.a i_tag = soup.i i_tag.decompose() a_tag # I linked to

Code language: Python (python)

If you want to really sure that the tag is decomposed, you can check its .decomposed property.

i_tag.decomposed # True a_tag.decomposed # False

Code language: Python (python)

BeautifulSoup’s unwrap() method replaces a tag with the contents inside that tag, returning the tag that was replaced. If you want to remove a parent HTML tag from the BeautifulSoup tree and keeping its children and descendants, this is the method you’re looking for.

markup = 'I linked to example.com' soup = BeautifulSoup(markup, 'html.parser') a_tag = soup.a a_tag.i.unwrap() a_tag # I linked to example.com

Code language: Python (python)

Conclusion

We hope that you found the right method to remove a tag from HTML that is suitable for your case from the information above. If you’re interested in more BeautifulSoup basic tutorials, check out our guide on how to find an element by class, how to get text from web pages and how to get attributes of elements in BeautifulSoup.

If you have any questions, then please feel free to ask in the comments below.

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Last update on August 19 2022 21:51:46 (UTC/GMT +8 hours)

BeautifulSoup: Exercise-33 with Solution

Write a Python program to remove a tag from a given tree of html document and destroy it and its contents.

Sample Solution:

Python Code:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
html_content = 'Python exercisesw3resource'
soup = BeautifulSoup(html_content, "lxml")
print("Original Markup:")
a_tag = soup.a
print(a_tag)
new_tag = soup.a.decompose()
print("After decomposing:")
print(new_tag)

Sample Output:

Original Markup:
Python exercisesw3resource
After decomposing:
None

Python Code Editor:

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Python: Tips of the Day

Combining Lists Using Zip:

  • Takes multiple collections and returns a new collection.
  • The new collection contains items where each item contains one element from each input collection.
  • It allows us to transverse multiple collections at the same time.
name = 'abcdef'
suffix = [1,2,3,4,5,6]
zip(name, suffix)
--> returns (a,1),(b,2),(c,3),(d,4),(e,5),(f,6)

How do I remove HTML tags with BeautifulSoup?

It's one of the most used libraries for Web Scraping..
Import bs4 library..
Create an HTML doc..
Parse the content into a BeautifulSoup object..
Iterate over the data to remove the tags from the document using decompose() method..
Use stripped_strings() method to retrieve the tag content..
Print the extracted data..

How do you delete an element in BeautifulSoup?

This article depicts how beautifulsoup can be employed to delete child element..
Import module..
Scrap data from webpage..
Parse the string scraped to html..
Find the tag whose child element to be deleted..
Use any of the methods: clear(), decompose() or replace()..
Print replaced content..

How do you remove HTML tags in Python?

How does the above code work?.
Initially, we import the regex module in python named 're'.
Then we use the re. compile() function of the regex module. ... .
'. *' means zero or more than zero characters. ... .
Then we use re. ... .
Finally, we call the function remove_html which removes the HTML tags from the input string..

Which function is used to delete a particular tag along with all its child tags?

The removeChild() method removes an element's child.