Fix Python – Extracting an attribute value with beautifulsoup

Question 1

I am trying to extract the content of a single “value” attribute in a specific “input” tag on a webpage. I use the following code:

import urllib
f = urllib.urlopen("http://58.68.130.147")
s = f.read()
f.close()

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulStoneSoup
soup = BeautifulStoneSoup(s)

inputTag = soup.findAll(attrs={"name" : "stainfo"})

output = inputTag['value']

print str(output)

I get a TypeError: list indices must be integers, not str

even though from the Beautifulsoup documentation i understand that strings should not be a problem here… but i a no specialist and i may have misunderstood.

Any suggestion is greatly appreciated!

Question 2

.find_all() returns list of all found elements, so:

input_tag = soup.find_all(attrs={"name" : "stainfo"})

input_tag is a list (probably containing only one element). Depending on what you want exactly you either should do:

output = input_tag[0]['value']

or use .find() method which returns only one (first) found element:

input_tag = soup.find(attrs={"name": "stainfo"})
output = input_tag['value']

Question

Answer