Beautiful Soup if Class "Contains" or Regex?

Question

If my class names are constantly different say for example:

listing-col-line-3-11 dpt 41
listing-col-block-1-22 dpt 41
listing-col-line-4-13 CWK 12

Normally I could do:

for EachPart in soup.find_all("div", {"class" : "ClassNamesHere"}):
            print EachPart.get_text()

There are way too many class names to work with here so a bunch of these are out.

I know Python doesn't have a ".contains" I would normally use but it does have an "in". Though I haven't been able to work out a way to incorporate that.

I'm hoping there's a way to do this with regex. Though again my Python syntax is really letting me down I've been trying variations on:

regex = re.compile('.*listing-col-.*')
    for EachPart in soup.find_all(regex):

But that doesn't seem to be doing the trick.

Answer 1

BeautifulSoup supports CSS selectors which allow you to select elements based on the content of particular attributes. This includes the selector *= for contains.

The following will return all div elements with a class attribute containing the text 'listing-col-':

for EachPart in soup.select('div[class*="listing-col-"]'):
    print EachPart.get_text()

Answer 2

You can try this for loop:

regex = re.compile('.*listing-col-.*')
for EachPart in soup.find_all("div", {"class" : regex}):
        print EachPart.get_text()

Answer 3

You could avoid regex by using partial matching with gazpacho...

Input:

html = """\
<div class="listing-col-line-3-11 dpt 41">A</div>
<div class="listing-col-block-1-22 dpt 41">B</div>
<div class="listing-col-line-4-13 CWK 12">C</div>
"""

Partial matching code:

from gazpacho import Soup

soup = Soup(html)
divs = soup.find("div", {"class": "listing-col-"}, partial=True)
[div.text for div in divs]

Output:

['A', 'B', 'C']