Question

Working code: Google dictionary lookup via python and beautiful soup -> simply execute and enter a word.

I ve quite simply extracted the first definition from a specific list item. However to get plain data, I ve had to split my data at the line break, and then strip it to remove the superfluous list tag.

My question is, is there a method to extract the data contained within a specific list without doing my above string manipulation - perhaps a function in beautiful soup that I have yet to see?

This is the relevant section of code:

# Retrieve HTML and parse with BeautifulSoup.
    doc = userAgentSwitcher().open(queryURL).read()
    soup = BeautifulSoup(doc)

# Extract the first list item -> and encode it.
    definition = soup( li , limit=2)[0].encode( utf-8 )

# Format the return as word:definition removing superfluous data.
    print word + " : " + definition.split("<br />")[0].strip("<li>")

Answer 1

I think you are looking for findAll(text=True) this will extract the text from the tags

definitions = soup( ul )[0].findAll(text=True)

Will return a ist of all the text contents broken at the tag boundaries

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