How to get text which has no HTML tag | Add multiple delimiters in split

Question

Following XPath select div element with class ajaxcourseindentfix and split it from Prerequisite and gives me all the content after prerequisite.

div = soup.select("div.ajaxcourseindentfix")[0]
" ".join([word for word in div.stripped_strings]).split("Prerequisite: ")[-1]

My div can have not only prerequisite but also the following splitting points:

Prerequisites
Corerequisite
Corerequisites

Now, whenever I have Prerequisite, above XPath works fine but whenever anything from above three comes, the XPath fails and gives me the whole text.

Is there a way to put multiple delimiters in XPath? Or how do I solve it?

Sample pages:

Corequisite URL: http://catalog.fullerton.edu/ajax/preview_course.php?catoid=16&coid=96106&show

Prerequisite URL: http://catalog.fullerton.edu/ajax/preview_course.php?catoid=16&coid=96564&show

Both: http://catalog.fullerton.edu/ajax/preview_course.php?catoid=16&coid=98590&show

[Old Thread] - How to get text which has no HTML tag

Answer 1

This code is the solution to your problem unless you need XPath specifically, I would also suggest that you review BeautifulSoup documentation on the methods I've used, you can find that HERE

.next_element and .next_sibling can be very useful in these cases. or .next_elements we'll get a generator that we'll have either to convert or use it in a manner that we can manipulate a generator.

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests


url = 'http://catalog.fullerton.edu/ajax/preview_course.php?catoid=16&coid=96564&show'
makereq = requests.get(url).text

soup = BeautifulSoup(makereq, 'lxml')

whole = soup.find('td', {'class': 'custompad_10'})
# we select the whole table (td), not needed in this case
thedivs = whole.find_all('div')
# list of all divs and elements within them

title_h3 = thedivs[2]
# we select only yhe second one (list) and save it in a var

mytitle = title_h3.h3
# using .h3 we can traverse (go to the child <h3> element)

mylist = list(mytitle.next_elements)
# title_h3.h3 is still part of a three and we save all the neighbor elements 

the_text = mylist[3]
# we can then select specific elements 
# from a generator that we've converted into a list (i.e. list(...))

prequisite = mylist[6]

which_cpsc = mylist[8]

other_text = mylist[11]

print(the_text, ' is the text')
print(which_cpsc, other_text, ' is the cpsc and othertext ')
# this is for testing purposes

Solves both issues, we don't have to use CSS selectors and those weird list manipulations. Everything is organic and works well.