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

text='Python' searches for elements that have the exact text you provided:

import re
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup

html = """
exact text
   
almost exact text
"""
soup = BeautifulSoup(html)
print soup(text='exact text')
print soup(text=re.compile('exact text'))

Output

[u'exact text']
[u'exact text', u'almost exact text']

"To see if the string 'Python' is located on the page http://python.org":

import urllib2
html = urllib2.urlopen('http://python.org').read()
print 'Python' in html # -> True

If you need to find a position of substring within a string you could do html.find('Python').