Beautiful Soup and extracting a div and its contents by ID

Question

soup.find(\"tagName\", { \"id\" : \"articlebody\" })

Why does this NOT return the

...

tags

Answer 1

I think there is a problem when the 'div' tags are too much nested. I am trying to parse some contacts from a facebook html file, and the Beautifulsoup is not able to find tags "div" with class "fcontent".

This happens with other classes as well. When I search for divs in general, it turns only those that are not so much nested.

The html source code can be any page from facebook of the friends list of a friend of you (not the one of your friends). If someone can test it and give some advice I would really appreciate it.

This is my code, where I just try to print the number of tags "div" with class "fcontent":

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup 
f = open('/Users/myUserName/Desktop/contacts.html')
soup = BeautifulSoup(f) 
list = soup.findAll('div', attrs={'class':'fcontent'})
print len(list)