B-Soup: broken iterator, tag a keyword?

[Brendan]

Hi there,
I have the following using Beautiful Soup:

soup = BeautifulSoup(data)
tags = soup.findAll(href=re.compile("/MER_FRS_L2_Canada/MER_FRS_\S
+gz"))
for tag in tags:
print tag['href']
print tag.parent.nextSibling.string
print tag.parent.nextSibling.nextSibling.string
print tag.parent.nextSibling.nextSibling.nextSibling.str ing
print
tag.parent.nextSibling.nextSibling.nextSibling.nex tSibling.contents[0].string
For some reason I do not understand, using 'tag' as an iterator breaks
the code. Can someone tell me why? reading dir(soup) did not
illuminate me.

Thanks

[Stefan Behnel]

Hi,

Brendan wrote:

I have the following using Beautiful Soup:

soup = BeautifulSoup(data)
tags = soup.findAll(href=re.compile("/MER_FRS_L2_Canada/MER_FRS_\S
+gz"))
for tag in tags:
print tag['href']
print tag.parent.nextSibling.string
print tag.parent.nextSibling.nextSibling.string
print tag.parent.nextSibling.nextSibling.nextSibling.str ing
print
tag.parent.nextSibling.nextSibling.nextSibling.nex tSibling.contents[0].string

It's pretty impossible that the problem is the name "tag" here. But since you
didn't state what the actual problem is, let me suggest not to parse markup
with regular expressions in general (which BS does). Use a real XML/HTML
parser for that. lxml will work just fine (and it also has a nicer API).

http://codespeak.net/lxml/

Stefan