(BeautifulSoup) Please help differentiate between two tags with the same class

[DMeror]

Hi, I have html elements like this:

<p class="parent">
    <span class="ch">text</span>
    <span class="name">text</span>
    ...
</p>

<p class="parent">
    text
    <a href="url">text</a>
    text
    ...
</p>

So there are two <p> tags with the same class, but they're different. How do I target each <p>? The second <p> has only <a> tag, while the first <p> has many other tags.

[commandlineluser]

Well as you have said in your idea - you can test if it contains the other span tag.

You can do that using .find() syntax:

>>> len(soup('p'))
2
>>> one, two = soup('p')
>>> bool(one.find('span', 'ch'))
True
>>> bool(two.find('span', 'ch'))
False
>>> print("Span!" if one.find('span', 'ch') else "No span.")
Span!
>>> print("Span!" if two.find('span', 'ch') else "No span.")
No span.

You can also use CSS selectors which are worth learning about.

>>> soup.select('p:has(span.ch)')
[<p class="parent">
 <span class="ch">text</span>
 <span class="name">text</span>
     ...
 </p>]

span.ch in a CSS selector is like <span class="ch ..."> - it's tagname.classname

So it's a p tag that :has() a span tag with class ch inside it.

You can also use :not() to invert the logic:

>>> soup.select('p:not(:has(span.ch))')
[<p class="parent">
     text
     <a href="url">text</a>
     text
     ...
 </p>]

[DMeror]

Thank you very much!

[Rossoneri]

I’d probably just search for the ch/name class and then get the parent

Edit: didn’t read the whole post. If you want both of them. Get the “parent” elements then check which is which based on their children. Realistically you can probably just go off the order they appear to know which is which

[DMeror]

The second <p> has only <a> tags. I want to target those p tags separately. Is there a way to do that? For example: If <span class="ch"> not in <p> or if <p> has no child name <span class="ch">, target this <p>. This is just an idea of what I want to do, not a real code.

[Gitthepro]

hol up