Using BeautifulSoup to search HTML for string

I am using BeautifulSoup to look for user-entered strings on a specific page. For example, I want to see if the string 'Python' is located on the page: http://python.org

When I used: find_string = soup.body.findAll(text='Python'), find_string returned []

But when I used: find_string = soup.body.findAll(text=re.compile('Python'), limit=1), find_string returned [u'Python Jobs'] as expected

What is the difference between these two statements that makes the second statement work when there are more than one instances of the word to be searched?

The following line is looking for the exact NavigableString 'Python':

>>> soup.body.findAll(text='Python')
[]

Note that the following NavigableString is found:

>>> soup.body.findAll(text='Python Jobs') 
[u'Python Jobs']

Note this behaviour:

>>> import re
>>> soup.body.findAll(text=re.compile('^Python$'))
[]

So your regexp is looking for an occurrence of 'Python' not the exact match to the NavigableString 'Python'.

text='Python' searches for elements that have the exact text you provided:

import re
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup

html = """<p>exact text</p>
   <p>almost exact text</p>"""
soup = BeautifulSoup(html)
print soup(text='exact text')
print soup(text=re.compile('exact text'))

Output

[u'exact text']
[u'exact text', u'almost exact text']

"To see if the string 'Python' is located on the page http://python.org";:

import urllib2
html = urllib2.urlopen('http://python.org').read()
print 'Python' in html # -> True

If you need to find a position of substring within a string you could do html.find('Python').

In addition to the accepted answer. You can use a lambda instead of regex:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

html = """<p>test python</p>"""

soup = BeautifulSoup(html, "html.parser")

print(soup(text="python"))
print(soup(text=lambda t: "python" in t))

Output:

[]
['test python']

I have not used BeuatifulSoup but maybe the following can help in some tiny way.

import re
import urllib2
stuff = urllib2.urlopen(your_url_goes_here).read()  # stuff will contain the *entire* page

# Replace the string Python with your desired regex
results = re.findall('(Python)',stuff)

for i in results:
    print i

I'm not suggesting this is a replacement but maybe you can glean some value in the concept until a direct answer comes along.