line = line.strip() TypeError: 'NoneType' object is not callable

Question

I am trying to find all num's in a list from an html using beautifulsoup:

import urllib
from BeautifulSoup import *
import re

line = None
url = raw_input('Enter - ')
html = urllib.urlopen(url).read()

soup = BeautifulSoup(html)

# Retrieve all of the anchor tags
tags = soup('span')
for line in tags:
    line = line.strip()
    numlist = re.findall('[0-9]+' , tags)
print numlist`

I'm getting a traceback:

Traceback (most recent call last): File "C:\Documents and Settings\mea388\Desktop\PythonSchool\new 12.py", line 14, in line = line.strip() TypeError: 'NoneType' object is not callable

I cannot understand why I'm getting a traceback.

Answer 1

That's because you are trying to run strip on the tag class within beautiful soup.

Change line 14 to:

 line = line.string.strip()

However be aware that this can still be None when the tag you are searching for has multiple sub elements. Seee link to string method on doco for beautiful soup