How to Extract Only Visible Text from Webpages with BeautifulSoup?

How to Extract Only Visible Text from Webpages with BeautifulSoup

Web scraping often involves selecting specific portions of a webpage's content, including visible text. BeautifulSoup, a popular web scraping library, can be used to extract just the visible text, excluding hidden elements such as comments and scripts.

Original Question:

The original question seeks to isolate the visible text from a webpage, specifically excluding script tags, HTML comments, and other non-visible content. The user desires to retrieve the main body text and potentially a few tab names, while avoiding elements like CSS and JavaScript.

Answer Explained:

The provided answer leverages BeautifulSoup along with custom filtering to fulfill this request. The tag_visible() function evaluates if a given element belongs to a specific set of invisible element types (e.g., style, script, head) or if it's an HTML comment. If so, it returns False, indicating the element should be excluded.

The text_from_html() function employs the BeautifulSoup.findAll() method with the text argument to capture all text elements. Subsequently, it applies the tag_visible() filter to the text elements to isolate the visible ones. Lastly, it combines the visible texts into a single string, producing the desired result of only the webpage's visible text.

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