14.5. Plan 4: Get info from a single tag

14.5.1. Plan 4: Example

Maybe we want to get just one piece of information from a webpage. In this example, we want to get the first link to a news story from a professor’s page.

Here’s what we see when we use the “inspect” function in the browser.

Since that tag is the first of its type on the page, we can use the plan Get info from a single tag.

Goal: Get info from a single tag
# Get first tag of a certain type from the soup
tag = soup.find('a', class_='item-teaser--heading-link')
# Get info from tag
info = tag.get('href')

14.5.2. Plan 4: When to use it

Use this when you want to get information that is in the first tag of a certain type on the page.

14.5.3. Plan 4: How to use it

Once you’ve found the tag you want to get information from, do two things:

1. Find the tag description and put it into the first slot.

How do you do that? Here are some examples:

What you see when you inspect		Tag description in the code
<p>	->	'p'
<h3>	->	'h3'
<div class="comment">	->	'div', class_='comment'
<span style="X5e72;">	->	'span', style='X5e72;'
<a class="css4z" href="/orders">	->	'a', class_='css4z'

2. Determine if you want to get text from a tag, or a link from a tag

The info you want		What you put in the code
The tag’s text	->	text
The tag’s link	->	get('href') or get('href', None)

One type of tag, the a tag, holds a link.

Here is the tag that creates the link to the North Quad dining hall page. It is an ‘a’ tag.

If you want to get the link from a tag, use get('href') in the second slot in this plan.

14.5.4. Plan 4: Exercises

Q-1: What is the link of the tag below?



• https://www.si.umich.edu/people/barbara-ericson

• No, this is the full link, but there is a relative link in the tag.

• /people/barbara-ericson

• Correct!

• a

• No, this is the name of the tag

• Barbara Ericson

• No, this is the text of the tag

Q-2: If you wanted to get a link from the first 'a' tag on a webpage, which part(s) of the code below would you change? Click on those parts of the code.Check out the plan outline above to identify the slot.

# Get first tag of a certain type from the soup
tag = soup.find('div', class_='Comments_StyledComments-dzzyvm-0 dvnRbr')

# Get info from tag
info = tag.text

Check out the image below, that inspects the description of the North Quad dining hall.

Choose the subgoals that get the text from the tag that has the description of the North Quad dining hall, and put them in the right order. You do not need to use all the blocks.

        # Get first tag of a certain type from the soup
tag = soup.find('span', style='font-weight: 400;')
---
# Get first tag of a certain type from the soup
tag = soup.find('span') #paired
---
# Get info from tag
info = tag.text
---
# Get info from tag
info = tag.get('href') #distractor
---
# Get all tags of a certain type from the soup
tags = soup.find_all('p')#distractor
        

Note

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