clone element with beautifulsoup

Question

I have to copy a part of one document to another, but I don\'t want to modify the document I copy from.

If I use .extract() it removes the element from

Answer 1

It may not be the fastest solution, but it is short and seems to work...

clonedtag = BeautifulSoup(str(sourcetag)).body.contents[0]

BeautifulSoup creates an extra ... around the cloned tag (in order to make the "soup" a sane html document). .body.contents[0] removes those wrapping tags.

This idea was derived Peter Woods comment above and Clemens Klein-Robbenhaar's comment below.