find() after replaceWith() doesn't work (using BeautifulSoup)

Question

Please consider the following python session:

>>> from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
>>> s = BeautifulSoup(\"
This is         


        

Answer 1

The problem seems to be that a BeautifulSoup object is considered an entire document. find iterates through the document asking each element for the next element after it. But when it gets to your BeautifulSoup("was"), that object thinks it is the whole document, so it says there is nothing after it. This aborts the search too early.

I don't think BeautifulSoup is designed to have BeautifulSoup objects inside other BeautifulSoup objects. The workaround is don't do that. Why do you feel you need to use the first form instead of the second one, which already works? If you want to replace an element with some bit of HTML, use a Tag for your replacement, not a BeautifulSoup object.