When scraping websites using Python, the requests-html library is a popular choice among developers. It provides a convenient way to make HTTP requests and parse HTML content. One common task when scraping websites is accessing the attributes of HTML tags. In this blog post, we will explore how to access the attributes of HTML tags using requests-html in Python.

Installation

Before we begin, let’s make sure we have requests-html installed. You can install it using pip:

pip install requests-html

Importing the necessary modules

To start working with requests-html, we need to import the required modules. Open a new Python file and add the following import statement:

from requests_html import HTMLSession

Making a request

Now let’s create a session object from HTMLSession. This object allows us to send HTTP requests and retrieve HTML content. We can use the get() method to send a GET request to a website. For example, let’s scrape the HTML content of the Python website:

session = HTMLSession()
response = session.get('https://www.python.org')

Accessing tag attributes

Once we have the HTML content, we can access the attributes of HTML tags. The requests-html library provides a convenient way to do this using the .find() method. Let’s say we want to access the href attribute of all the <a> tags in the HTML content. We can do it like this:

links = response.html.find('a')
for link in links:
    href = link.attrs['href']
    print(href)

In the above code, we are using the .find() method to find all the <a> tags. Then, in the loop, we are accessing the href attribute of each <a> tag using the attrs property. Finally, we are printing the href attribute.

We can also access other attributes like class, id, etc., using the same syntax.

Conclusion

In this blog post, we have learned how to access tag attributes using the requests-html library in Python. With this knowledge, you can now scrape websites and extract data by accessing the attributes of HTML tags. Happy web scraping!

Remember to always respect website owners’ terms of service and use web scraping responsibly.