Quick question [I am not very familiar with Python's BeautifulSoup()] If I have the following element,
how can I extract/get "1 comment" (or, "2 comments", etc.)? There is no class (or id, or other attributes) in that "a" tag.
<td class="subtext">
<a href="item?id=22823679">1 comment</a>
</td>
You can use select method to apply a querySelect into your html, and then take the contents of the elements you found:
elements = soup.select(".subtext a")
[x.contents for x in elements]
How about the following, test with local html file
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
url = "D:\\Temp\\example.html"
with open(url, "r") as page:
contents = page.read()
soup = BeautifulSoup(contents, 'html.parser')
element = soup.select('td.subtext')
value = element[0].get_text()
print(value)
example.html
<html>
<head></head>
<body>
<td class="subtext">
<a href="item?id=22823679">1 comment</a>
</td>
</body>
</html>