Beautifulsoup 4: Remove comment tag and its content
You can use extract()
(solution is based on this answer):
PageElement.extract() removes a tag or string from the tree. It returns the tag or string that was extracted.
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup, Comment
data = """<div class="foo">
cat dog sheep goat
<!--
<p>test</p>
-->
</div>"""
soup = BeautifulSoup(data)
div = soup.find('div', class_='foo')
for element in div(text=lambda text: isinstance(text, Comment)):
element.extract()
print soup.prettify()
As a result you get your div
without comments:
<div class="foo">
cat dog sheep goat
</div>
Usually modifying the bs4 parse tree is unnecessary. You can just get the div's text, if that's what you wanted:
soup.body.div.text
Out[18]: '\ncat dog sheep goat\n\n'
bs4
separates out the comment. However if you really need to modify the parse tree:
from bs4 import Comment
for child in soup.body.div.children:
if isinstance(child,Comment):
child.extract()