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Start your free trialPhil Spelman
6,664 PointsJust wondering if there's a reason to use a for loop here; I thought soup.find(...) would only get the first result
I wanted to know if there's a specific reason for using a for loop in the example: for button in soup.find(attrs={'class': 'button button--primary'}): print(button)
My understanding was that using soup.find() (vs. soup.find_all()) would only return a single result
2 Answers
Jason Anders
Treehouse Moderator 145,860 PointsHey Phil,
That's a very good question! I don't understand why a loop was used either. Tagging Ken Alger for further clarification.
:)
Alex Koumparos
Python Development Techdegree Student 36,887 PointsI think this is a bug in Ken's script, and it's not mere overkill. The behaviour is significantly different. Gari is not quite right when he describes the return value of find. It doesn't return a single item list, it returns a single item:
This means that Ken's for loop is not iterating (once) through a single item list, it is iterating several times through the individual children of that one result (and printing the string representation of the child object). With find_all
, it would iterate once through a single item list (printing the string representation of the single element with the class "button button--primary").
Compare these two outputs:
>>> # create a simple demonstration HTML snippet
>>> html = """<div class="my_class">
... <h1>A heading</h1>
... <p>A paragraph</p>
... </div>"""
>>> soup = BeautifulSoup(html, 'html.parser')
>>> for elem in soup.find(class_="my_class"):
... print("before elem")
... print(elem)
... print("after elem")
before elem
after elem
before elem
<h1>A heading</h1>
after elem
before elem
after elem
before elem
<p>A paragraph</p>
after elem
before elem
after elem
>>> for elem in soup.find_all(class_="my_class", limit=1):
... print("before elem")
... print(elem)
... print("after elem")
before elem
<div class="my_class">
<h1>A heading</h1>
<p>A paragraph</p>
</div>
after elem
Hope that is clear.
Cheers,
Alex
Gari Merrifield
9,597 PointsGari Merrifield
9,597 PointsIt does seem like overkill, but 'for' will work on a single item array just as well as a multiple item array.
It would make it easier if you later were to convert to a '.find_all()', you wouldn't have to rewrite any code, just add the "_all"...
My two cents worth...