How to Use BeautifulSoup To Extract Title Tag
This tutorial will explore the various methods available in BeautifulSoup to extract the title tag in HTML, along with hands-on examples for each method. These methods include:
By the end of this tutorial, you will clearly understand how to use each method to extract the title tag in HTML using BeautifulSoup. You will also know how to extract the title tag from any website page.
Extract title tag using .title property
The ‘.title’ property extracts the title tag from the HTML code. If the title tag is present, it returns the tag. If it’s not, it returns ‘None’.
Hello World!
This is my first HTML page.
''' soup = BeautifulSoup(html, "html.parser") # Parse HTML title = soup.title # Get Title Tag print(title) Now, let’s get the content inside title tag.
Hello World!
This is my first HTML page.
''' soup = BeautifulSoup(html, "html.parser") # Parse HTML title = soup.title # Get title Tag print(title.string) # Print the content of title tag As you can see, we’ve used the «.string» attribute to extract the content of the title tag. It is important to remember that if there is no content to the title tag, you will receive an error message: «AttributeError: ‘NoneType’ object has no attribute ‘string'».
However, to resolve this issue, we need first to check if the title is present. See the code below:
Hello World!
This is my first HTML page.
''' soup = BeautifulSoup(html, "html.parser") # Parse HTML title = soup.title # Get title Tag if title: # Check if the Title Tag is present print("The title tag is present") #print(title.string) else: print("The title tag is not present") For more information about the .string property, check out this article BeautifulSoup: .string & .strings properties.
Extract the title tag using the find() function.
Another way to extract the title tag is by using the ‘find()’ function. This function finds the first tag with a given name, class, or ID. Here’s an example:
Hello World!
This is my first HTML page.
''' soup = BeautifulSoup(html, "html.parser") # Parse HTML title = soup.find("title") # Find Title Tag print(title) If the title tag is not present, it returns ‘None’.
If you want to find the title tag that has content, set ‘string=True’, as in the following example:
Hello World!
This is my first HTML page.
''' soup = BeautifulSoup(html, "html.parser") # Parse HTML title = soup.find("title", string=True) # Find Title Tag The code above returns the title tag if its content exists. Otherwise, it returns ‘None’.
Extract the title tag using select() function
We can also use the ‘select_one()’ function to extract the title tag from HTML. The ‘select_one()’ method returns only the first element that matches the selector.
Hello World!
This is my first HTML page.
''' soup = BeautifulSoup(html, "html.parser") # Parse HTML title = soup.select_one("title") # select Title Tag print(title) Extract the title tag from any website
To extract the title tag from a website, we need to use ‘requests’ with BeautifulSoup. ‘Requests’ is used to send HTTP requests and retrieve information from a web page.
However, to install requests, execute the following command:
To install ‘requests’, run the following command:
Voila! We successfully got the title tag.
Conclusion
In conclusion, BeautifulSoup is a powerful library for web scraping and parsing HTML content in Python. To extract the title tag from HTML, we’ve used the .title property, find() or select().
To extract the title tag from a website, we’ve used requests to send HTTP and get the content and .title property to get the title tag from it.