Using BeautifulSoup to search html for string

Question

I am using BeautifulSoup to look for user entered strings on a specific page. For example, I want to see if the string \'Python\' is located on the page: http://python.org<

Answer 1

The following line is looking for the exact NavigableString 'Python':

>>> soup.body.findAll(text='Python')
[]

Note that the following NavigableString is found:

>>> soup.body.findAll(text='Python Jobs') 
[u'Python Jobs']

Note this behaviour:

>>> import re
>>> soup.body.findAll(text=re.compile('^Python$'))
[]

So your regexp is looking for an occurrence of 'Python' not the exact match to the NavigableString 'Python'.