BeautifulSoup raise AttributeError when xml tag name contains capital letters

Question

I\'m trying to get all the XML attributes for the tag Name.

Getting this error:

AttributeError: \'NoneType\' object has no attribute \'attr         


        

Answer 1

BeautifulSoup is a HTML-parsing library, primarily. It can handle XML too, but all tags are lowercased as per the HTML specification. Quoting the BeautifulSoup documentation:

Because HTML tags and attributes are case-insensitive, all three HTML parsers convert tag and attribute names to lowercase. That is, the markup is converted to . If you want to preserve mixed-case or uppercase tags and attributes, you’ll need to parse the document as XML.

There is a XML modus where tags are matches case-sensitively and are not lowercased, but this requires the lxml library to be installed. Because lxml is a C-extension library, this is not supported on the Google App Engine.

Use the ElementTree API instead:

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

root = ET.fromstring(xml)
div = root.find('.//Name')

for attr, val in div.items():
     print "%s:%s" % (attr, val)