It's probably I who have misunderstood both find_all and find_parent.

*sample copy/paste code*

tekst = '<li> <a href="http://ekstrabladet.dk/minsag/article1798780.ece"
class="txt">30/7-10 EB=Hold kft hvor er hun Dum=(Thorning) ?<em>28.
jul</em></a> </li>'
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import re
soup = BeautifulSoup(tekst)
context = soup.find_all(text=re.compile("Thorning"))

print context

 This returns (I had only expected it to return the string I was looking
for: "Thorning"):
*Output*
[u'30/7-10 EB=Hold kft hvor er hun Dum=(Thorning) ?']

When I look into context:

*sample copy/paste code*

for c in context:
    for i in c.find_parent():
        print "RESULT: %s" % i                                            
          ...

*
*
*Output*
RESULT: 30/7-10 EB=Hold kft hvor er hun Dum=(Thorning) ?
RESULT: <em>28. jul</em>

The first result is exactly what I would expect - but I don't understand
the second result?

Any help appreciated,
Sincerely

Andreas

When you search by regular expression, you find the entire string that
matches the regular expression, not just the part of the string that
matches.

The prettify() method is useful when trying to understand these things:

print c.find_parent().prettify()
# <a class="txt" href="http://ekstrabladet.dk/minsag/article1798780.ece">
#  30/7-10 EB=Hold kft hvor er hun Dum=(Thorning) ?
#  <em>
#   28. jul
#  </em>
# </a>

The result of c.find_parent() is an <A> tag that contains a string and
an <EM> tag. When you iterate over a tag, you iterate over its
children. Here, the first result is the string and the second result
is the <EM> tag.

Leonard

Thanks for getting me up to speed Leonard. Everything now works as
expected! - Love BS4 - What ever other reasons there is, I find it much
easier than lxml (for my needs anyway). Also really good documentation.
Thanks again.