Versions used: BS4, lxml, Python3.9
Say I have some HTML:
<div>
<p>Hello</p>
<h1>hi</h1>
<div id="hello"></div>
<h1>Hello</h1>
</div>
If I have some HTML selected: legal_div = soup.find(id="hello"), how could I discard or disregard any tag before that legal_div. I'd prefer to use lxml, but if it isn't possible, then html.parser is fine as well.
Edit: When I say discard, I mean that if I were to search for any <h1> tags, I should only see "Hello", not "hi"
I'm not quite sure what you want. If you strictly just need to find that specific <h1> tag, then do as Andrej has it and get that element, and find_next() h1 tag.
But if you need to alter the html, you can get all the h1 tags and use .decompose() any that didnt follow your specified criteria:
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
html = '''<div>
<p>Hello</p>
<h1>hi</h1>
<div id="hello"></div>
<h1>Hello</h1>
</div>'''
soup = BeautifulSoup(html, 'html.parser')
print('\tBefore:\n\n%s' %soup)
all_h1 = soup.find_all('h1')
print('\n',all_h1)
for each in all_h1:
if each.find_previous().name == 'div' and each.find_previous().attrs['id'] == 'hello':
continue
else:
each.decompose()
print('\n\n\tAfter:\n\n%s' %soup)
all_h1 = soup.find_all('h1')
print('\n',all_h1)
Output:
Before:
<div>
<p>Hello</p>
<h1>hi</h1>
<div id="hello"></div>
<h1>Hello</h1>
</div>
[<h1>hi</h1>, <h1>Hello</h1>]
After:
<div>
<p>Hello</p>
<div id="hello"></div>
<h1>Hello</h1>
</div>
[<h1>Hello</h1>]
You can use legal_div.find_next('h1'). For example:
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
html_doc = """
<div>
<p>Hello</p>
<h1>hi</h1>
<div id="hello"></div>
<h1>Hello</h1>
</div>
"""
soup = BeautifulSoup(html_doc, "html.parser")
legal_div = soup.find(id="hello")
next_h1 = legal_div.find_next("h1")
print(next_h1)
Prints:
<h1>Hello</h1>
Or using ~ in CSS selector:
all_next_h1 = soup.select("#hello ~ h1")
print(all_next_h1)
Prints:
[<h1>Hello</h1>]