In BeautifulSoup / Python, how do I extract a single element from a result set?

Question

I'm using Python 3.7 and BeautifulSoup 4. I'm having a problem getting text from an element. I'm trying this

req = urllib2.Request(fullurl, headers=settings.HDR)
html = urllib2.urlopen(req, timeout=settings.SOCKET_TIMEOUT_IN_SECONDS).read()
bs = BeautifulSoup(html, features="lxml")
...
author_elts = bs.find_all("a", class_="author")
author_elt = author_elts.first

But on the "author_elt = author_elts.first" line, I'm getting the error

AttributeError: ResultSet object has no attribute 'first'. You're probably treating a list of items like a single item. Did you call find_all() when you meant to call find()

What's the right way to extract the element from the ResultSet?

Does this answer your question? [Beautiful Soup: 'ResultSet' object has no attribute 'find\_all'?](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24108507/beautiful-soup-resultset-object-has-no-attribute-find-all) — AMC, Mar 22 '20 at 22:39

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 04 '19 at 15:54

1

find_all return a list, why did you not use author_elts[0] to get the first element ?

answered Nov 04 '19 at 15:54

Maaz

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In BeautifulSoup / Python, how do I extract a single element from a result set?

1 Answers1