Beautiful Soup Using Regex to Find Tags?

python, regex, web-scraping

Solution

`find_all()` is the most favored method in the Beautiful Soup search API.

You can pass a variation of filters. Also, pass a list to find multiple tags:

>>> soup.find_all(['a', 'div'])

Example:

>>> from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
>>> soup = BeautifulSoup('<html><body><div>asdfasdf</div><p><a>foo</a></p></body></html>')
>>> soup.find_all(['a', 'div'])
[<div>asdfasdf</div>, <a>foo</a>]

Or you can use a regular expression to find tags that contain `a` or `div`:

>>> import re
>>> soup.find_all(re.compile("(a|div)"))

Problem

I'd really like to be able to allow Beautiful Soup to match any list of tags, like so. I know attr accepts regex, but is there anything in beautiful soup that allows you to do so? ``` soup.findAll("(a|div)") ``` Output: ``` <a> ASDFS <div> asdfasdf <a> asdfsdf ``` My goal is to create a scraper that can grab tables from sites. Sometimes tags are named inconsistently, and I'd like to be able to input a list of tags to name the 'data' part of a table.

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