getText() vs text() vs get_text()

Question

I have a chunk of html extracted with bs4 as following

<div class="a-section a-spacing-small" id="productDescription">
<!-- show up to 2 reviews by default -->
<p>Satin Smooth Universal Protective Wax Pot Collars by Satin Smooth</p>
</div>

To extract the text I was using text.strip()

output.text()

It gave me the output "TypeError: 'str' object is not callable"

While I used output.get_text() and output.getText(), I got the desired text

What are the differences between these 3? why the get_text() and getText() is giving the same output?

Possible duplicate of [Differences between .text and .get\_text()](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/35496332/differences-between-text-and-get-text) — Nelewout, Aug 30 '18 at 09:43

L3viathan · Accepted Answer · 2018-08-30T12:18:45.640

6

They are very similar:

.get_text is a function that returns the text of a tag as a string
.text is a property that calls get_text (so it's identical, except you don't use parantheses)
.getText is an alias of get_text

I would use .text whenever possible, and .get_text(...) when you need to pass custom arguments (e.g. foo.get_text(strip=True, seperator='\n')).

edited Aug 30 '18 at 12:18

answered Aug 30 '18 at 09:46

L3viathan

26,748
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Thanks! I just found that printing `output.p.contents` also gives me the text in a list with tabs and new lines. – Proteeti Prova Aug 30 '18 at 09:50
Typo: `expect` `->` `except` – N Chauhan Aug 30 '18 at 10:13
@NChauhan Thanks! Feel free to fix obvious mistakes like that (or suggest the fix, if you don't have enough rep to actually edit) – L3viathan Aug 30 '18 at 12:19
1

I would have, but editing requires at least a 6 character change :) – N Chauhan Aug 30 '18 at 12:20

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 20 '21 at 08:29

1

By my knowledge which is very basic.

.text only gives you output in string form while getText() gives you accessibility to apply various custom arguments over the strings you want from the given object

answered Jul 20 '21 at 08:29

Spartex

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9

getText() vs text() vs get_text()

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