BeautifulSoup innerhtml?

Question

Let's say I have a page with a div. I can easily get that div with soup.find().

Now that I have the result, I'd like to print the WHOLE innerhtml of that div: I mean, I'd need a string with ALL the html tags and text all toegether, exactly like the string I'd get in javascript with obj.innerHTML. Is this possible?

Answer 1

TL;DR

With BeautifulSoup 4 use element.encode_contents() if you want a UTF-8 encoded bytestring or use element.decode_contents() if you want a Python Unicode string. For example the DOM's innerHTML method might look something like this:

def innerHTML(element):     """Returns the inner HTML of an element as a UTF-8 encoded bytestring"""     return element.encode_contents() 

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These functions aren't currently in the online documentation so I'll quote the current function definitions and the doc string from the code.

encode_contents - since 4.0.4

def encode_contents(     self, indent_level=None, encoding=DEFAULT_OUTPUT_ENCODING,     formatter="minimal"):     """Renders the contents of this tag as a bytestring.      :param indent_level: Each line of the rendering will be        indented this many spaces.      :param encoding: The bytestring will be in this encoding.      :param formatter: The output formatter responsible for converting        entities to Unicode characters.     """ 

See also the documentation on formatters; you'll most likely either use formatter="minimal" (the default) or formatter="html" (for html entities) unless you want to manually process the text in some way.

encode_contents returns an encoded bytestring. If you want a Python Unicode string then use decode_contents instead.

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decode_contents - since 4.0.1

decode_contents does the same thing as encode_contents but returns a Python Unicode string instead of an encoded bytestring.

def decode_contents(self, indent_level=None,                    eventual_encoding=DEFAULT_OUTPUT_ENCODING,                    formatter="minimal"):     """Renders the contents of this tag as a Unicode string.      :param indent_level: Each line of the rendering will be        indented this many spaces.      :param eventual_encoding: The tag is destined to be        encoded into this encoding. This method is _not_        responsible for performing that encoding. This information        is passed in so that it can be substituted in if the        document contains a <META> tag that mentions the document's        encoding.      :param formatter: The output formatter responsible for converting        entities to Unicode characters.     """ 

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BeautifulSoup 3

BeautifulSoup 3 doesn't have the above functions, instead it has renderContents

def renderContents(self, encoding=DEFAULT_OUTPUT_ENCODING,                    prettyPrint=False, indentLevel=0):     """Renders the contents of this tag as a string in the given     encoding. If encoding is None, returns a Unicode string..""" 

This function was added back to BeautifulSoup 4 (in 4.0.4) for compatibility with BS3.

Answer 2

One of the options could be use something like that:

 innerhtml = "".join([str(x) for x in div_element.contents])