Beautiful Soup [Python] and the extracting of text in a table - php

Question

i am new to Python and to Beatiful Soup also! I heard about BS. It is told to be a great tool to parse and extract content. So here i am...:
I want to take the content of the first td of a table in a html
document. For example, i have this table
<table class="bp_ergebnis_tab_info">
<tr>
<td>
This is a sample text
</td>
<td>
This is the second sample text
</td>
</tr>
</table>
How can i use beautifulsoup to take the text "This is a sample text"?
I use soup.findAll('table' ,attrs={'class':'bp_ergebnis_tab_info'}) to get
the whole table.
Thanks... or should i try to get the whole stuff with Perl ... which i am not so familiar with. Another soltion would be a regex in PHP.
See the target [1]: http://www.schulministerium.nrw.de/BP/SchuleSuchen?action=799.601437941842&SchulAdresseMapDO=142323
Note; since the html is a bit invalid - i think that we have to do some cleaning. That can cause a lot of PHP code - since we want to solve the job in PHP. Perl would be a good solution too.
Many thanks for some hints and ideas for a starting point
zero

Answer 1

First find the table (as you are doing). Using find rather than findall returns the first item in the list (rather than returning a list of all finds - in which case we'd have to add an extra [0] to take the first element of the list):
table = soup.find('table' ,attrs={'class':'bp_ergebnis_tab_info'})
Then use find again to find the first td:
first_td = table.find('td')
Then use renderContents() to extract the textual contents:
text = first_td.renderContents()
... and the job is done (though you may also want to use strip() to remove leading and trailing spaces:
trimmed_text = text.strip()
This should give:
>>> print trimmed_text
This is a sample text
>>>
as desired.

Answer 2

Use "text" to get text between "td"
1) First read table DOM using tag or ID
soup = BeautifulSoup(self.driver.page_source, "html.parser")
htnm_migration_table = soup.find("table", {'id':'htnm_migration_table'})
2) Read tbody
tbody = htnm_migration_table.find('tbody')
3) Read all tr from tbody tag
trs = tbody.find_all('tr')
4) get all tds using tr
for tr in trs:
tds = tr.find_all('td')
for td in tds:
print(td.text)

Answer 3

I find Beautiful Soup very efficient tool so keep learning it :-) It is able to parse a page with invalid markup so it should be able to handle the page you refer. You may want to use command BeautifulSoup(html).prettify() command if you want to get a valid reformatted page source with valid markup.
As for your question, the result of your first soup.findAll(...) command is also a Beautiful Soup object and you can make a second search in it, like this:
table_soup = soup.findAll('table' ,attrs={'class':'bp_ergebnis_tab_info'})
your_sample_text = table_soup.find("td").renderContents().strip()
print your_sample_text