Get value of span tag using BeautifulSoup

Question

I have a number of facebook groups that I would like to get the count of the members of. An example would be this group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/347805588637627/ I have

Answer 1

If you have more than one span tag you can try this

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

soup = BeautifulSoup(html, 'html.parser')

tags = soup('span')

for tag in tags:
  print(tag.contents[0])

Answer 2

In case there is more than one span tag in the page:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
soup = BeautifulSoup(your_html_input, 'html.parser')
span = soup.find("span", id="count_text")
span.text

Answer 3

Facebook uses javascrypt to prevent bots from scraping. You need to use selenium to extract data on python.

Answer 4

You can use the text attribute of the parsed span:

>>> from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
>>> soup = BeautifulSoup('<span id="count_text">9,413 members</span>',   'html.parser')
>>> soup.span
<span id="count_text">9,413 members</span> 
>>> soup.span.text
'9,413 members'