SoFunction
Updated on 2025-04-11

Python parses HTML and extracts text from span tags

During web development and data crawling, we often need to extract information from HTML pages, especially text in span elements. A span tag is an inline element that is usually used to wrap a small piece of text or other elements. In Python, we can parse HTML and extract text from span tags by using libraries such as BeautifulSoup or lxml.

This article will explain how to use Python to locate and extract text from span elements and show some common usages and examples.

1. Installation-related dependencies

Before we start, we need to install some necessary libraries, mainly BeautifulSoup and requests. requests are used to get web page content, while BeautifulSoup is used to parse and process HTML pages.

Install with the following command:

pip install beautifulsoup4 requests

2. HTML page structure

Suppose we have a simple HTML page with multiple span elements in it. We want to extract text from all span elements from it.

For example, suppose we have the following HTML file:

<html>
    <head>
        <title>Test the web page</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <div>
            <span class="price">￥99</span>
            <span class="discount">Discount: 20%</span>
            <span class="title">PythonTutorial</span>
        </div>
    </body>
</html>

We will extract all text from the span tags, or locate them based on the class name of the span tag.

3. Use BeautifulSoup to extract text in span elements

First, we need to use requests to get the web page content, and then use BeautifulSoup to parse and extract the data.

1. Get the content of the web page and parse HTML

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

# Get web contenturl = ''  # Replace with the actual web linkresponse = (url)
html_content = 

# Use BeautifulSoup to parse HTMLsoup = BeautifulSoup(html_content, '')

2. Extract text from all span elements

If we just want to extract the text from all span elements in the web page, we can use the find_all() method:

# Extract text from all span elementsspan_elements = soup.find_all('span')

# Print all span tags textfor span in span_elements:
    print(span.get_text())

This code will output:

￥99
Discount: 20%
PythonTutorial

3. Position specific span elements according to class attributes

Sometimes, we don't need to extract all span elements, we just need to locate the span of a specific class attribute. For example, suppose we just want to extract text from the span tag containing the price class:

# Find span elements with class 'price'price_span = ('span', class_='price')

# Get the text in the spanif price_span:
    print("price:", price_span.get_text())
else:
    print("No price found")

Output:

price: ￥99

4. Position span elements according to id attribute

If the span element has an id attribute, we can also locate it through id:

# Find span elements with id 'special-offer'offer_span = ('span', id='special-offer')

# Get the text in the spanif offer_span:
    print("Promotional information:", offer_span.get_text())
else:
    print("No offer information found")

4. Handle nested span elements

Sometimes the span element may be nested in other HTML elements. If we want to extract the text in a nested span, we can still use BeautifulSoup to achieve it.

For example, suppose the page structure is as follows:

<html>
    <body>
        <div>
            <span class="product-name">Pythonbooks</span>
            <span class="product-price"><span class="currency">￥</span>100</span>
        </div>
    </body>
</html>

We want to extract ￥100 in the price section, including nested currency class span elements.

# Extract price information (necked span elements)price_span = ('span', class_='product-price')

# Get text containing nested elementsif price_span:
    print("price:", price_span.get_text())
else:
    print("No price information found")

Output:

price: ￥100

5. Regular expression extraction

BeautifulSoup also supports regular expressions if we need to extract text from span tags based on more complex conditions. For example, we want to extract all price information (numbers starting with ￥):

import re

# Use regular expression to extract span elements starting with '￥'price_spans = soup.find_all('span', text=(r'￥\d+'))

for price in price_spans:
    print("Finished price:", price.get_text())

Output:

Find the price: ￥99

6. Summary

In this article, we learned how to extract span element content from a web page using Python. We first introduce how to parse HTML pages using BeautifulSoup and locate and extract text from span elements. Next, we explain how to locate specific span tags based on class or id attributes and handle nested span elements. Finally, with regular expressions, we can perform more flexible text matching.

These tips are very useful for web scraping, especially when you need to extract specific data from a web page. If you have a deeper interest in how to use Python for web crawling, you can learn more about requests and BeautifulSoup.

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