Beautiful Soup - next_element Property

Method Description

In Beautiful Soup library, the next_element property returns the Tag or NavigableString that appears immediately next to the current PageElement, even if it is out of the parent tree. There is also a next property which has similar behaviour

Syntax

Element.next_element

Return value

The next_element and next properties return a tag or a NavigableString appearing immediately next to the current tag.

Example 1

In the document tree parsed from the given HTML string, we find the next_element of the tag

html = '''
<p><b>Excellent</b><p>Python</p><p id='id1'>Tutorial</p></p>
'''
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

soup = BeautifulSoup(html, 'lxml')
tag = soup.b 
print (tag)
nxt = tag.next_element
print ("Next:",nxt)

nxt = tag.next_element.next_element
print ("Next:",nxt)

Output

<b>Excellent</b>
Next: Excellent
Next: <p>Python</p>

The output is a little strange as the next element for Excellent is shown to be 'Excellent', that is because the inner string is registered as the next element. To obtain the desired result (Python) as the next element, fetch the next_element property of the inner NavigableString object.

Example 2

The BeautifulSoup PageElements also support next property which is analogous to next_element property

html = '''
<p><b>Excellent</b><p>Python</p><p id='id1'>Tutorial</p></p>
'''
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
soup = BeautifulSoup(html, 'lxml')
tag = soup.b 
print (tag)
nxt = tag.next
print ("Next:",nxt)

nxt = tag.next.next
print ("Next:",nxt)

Output

<b>Excellent</b>
Next: Excellent
Next: <p>Python</p>

Example 3

In the next example, we try to determine the element next to <body> tag. As it is followed by a line break (\n), we need to find the next element of the one next to body tag. It happens to be <h1> tag.

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

fp = open("index.html")
soup = BeautifulSoup(fp, 'html.parser')

tag = soup.find('body')
nxt = tag.next_element.next
print ("Next:",nxt)

Output

Next: <h1>TutorialsPoint</h1>