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pythonhtmlbeautifulsouphtml-parsing

Find previous occurrence of an element

I have the following html:

<h4>Testing</h4>
<h3>Test</h3>
<h3>Test2</h3>
<h4>Testing2</h4>

If I have the element <h3>Test2</h3> referenced in a variable, how can I find <h4>Testing</h4>? The one before the referenced element, not after.

Solution

  • Use .previous_sibling:

    element.previous_sibling

    Or, .find_previous_sibling() to explicitly find the first preceding h4 tag:

    element.find_previous_sibling('h4')

    Demo:

    >>> from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
>>> data = """
... <h4>Testing</h4>
... <h3>Test</h3>
... <h3>Test2</h3>
... <h4>Testing2</h4>
... """
>>> soup = BeautifulSoup(data)
>>> element = soup.find('h3', text='Test')
>>> element.find_previous_sibling('h4')
<h4>Testing</h4>