I have a very simple tag replacement problem that I’m trying to solve with BeatifulSoup’s replace_with method but I’m having trouble understanding how this is supposed to work. I have the string '<b>This is text</b>' and I’d like to simply convert this to '<bold>This is text</bold>'. It seems like bs4’s replace_with command should be able to do this, but it’s not working like I’d expect. I tried (among some other variants) things like this:
>>> a = '<b>This is text</b>'
>>> soup = BeautifulSoup(a, 'html.parser')
>>> new_tag = soup.new_tag('bold')
>>> soup.b.replace_with(new_tag)
<b>This is text</b>
>>> soup
<bold></bold>
As you can see, the tags got replaced but then I lost the text. I can do this sort of thing with a string replacement but I’d really like to understand why this doesn’t work as I tend to run into similar issues with bs4 with other methods and I must misunderstand something fundamental here.
>Solution :
With .replace_with you’re replacing the whole tag with new one – and the new one doesn’t have any content(text). Try instead:
a = "<b>This is text</b>"
soup = BeautifulSoup(a, "html.parser")
soup.b.name = "bold"
print(soup)
Prints:
<bold>This is text</bold>