BeautifulSoup - Handing of cases where variable.find( ).string returns empty

beautifulsoup, python, python-3.x

Solution

You're correct, `soup.find` returns `None` if there's no element found.

You can just put an `if/else` clause to avoid this:

for item in fulllist:
    span = item.find("span", class_="modelYearSort")
    if span:
        item_print = span.string
        item_print=item_print + "|" + item.find("span", class_="mmtSort").string
        seller_phone=item.find("span", class_="seller-phone")
        print(seller_phone)
        # item_print=item_print + "|" + item.find("span", class_="seller-phone").string
        item_print=item_print + "|" + item.find("span", class_="priceSort").string
        item_print=item_print + "|" + item.find("span", class_="milesSort").string
        print(item_print)
    else:
        continue #It's empty, go on to the next loop.

Or if you like it, use a `try/except` block:

for item in fulllist:
    try:
        item_print=item.find("span", class_="modelYearSort").string
    except AttributeError:
        continue #skip to the next loop.
    else:
        item_print=item_print + "|" + item.find("span", class_="mmtSort").string
        seller_phone=item.find("span", class_="seller-phone")
        print(seller_phone)
        # item_print=item_print + "|" + item.find("span", class_="seller-phone").string
        item_print=item_print + "|" + item.find("span", class_="priceSort").string
        item_print=item_print + "|" + item.find("span", class_="milesSort").string
        print(item_print)

Hope this helps!

Problem

``` from bs4 import BeautifulSoup import codecs import sys import urllib.request site_response= urllib.request.urlopen("http://site/") html=site_response.read() file = open ("cars.html","wb") #open file in binary mode file.write(html) file.close() soup = BeautifulSoup(open("cars.html")) output = (soup.prettify('latin')) #print(output) #prints whole file for testing file_output = open ("cars_out.txt","wb") file_output.write(output) file_output.close() fulllist=soup.find_all("div", class_="row vehicle") #print(fulllist) #prints each row vehicle class for debug for item in fulllist: item_print=item.find("span", class_="modelYearSort").string item_print=item_print + "|" + item.find("span", class_="mmtSort").string seller_phone=item.find("span", class_="seller-phone") print(seller_phone) # item_print=item_print + "|" + item.find("span", class_="seller-phone").string item_print=item_print + "|" + item.find("span", class_="priceSort").string item_print=item_print + "|" + item.find("span", class_="milesSort").string print(item_print) ``` I have the code above, it parses some html code and generates a pipe delineated file . it works fine except for there are a few entries where one of the elements (seller-phone) is missing from the html code. Not all entries have a seller phone number. ``` item.find("span", class_="seller-phone").string ``` I get a failure here. I am not surprised that line fails when seller-phone is missing. I get 'AttributeError' NoneType object has not attribute string. I am able to do 'item.find' without the '.string' and get back the full block of html. But I can not figure out how to extract the text for those cases.

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