How to preserve spaces in the html class

[Paras Jain]

Hi All,

I have an HTML block where I'm using the classes as it is.

When I'm parsing HTML in soup, it normalises spaces and alters the class.

I this example<div class="class_with spaces">Content 1</div>

<div class="class_with         spaces">Content 1</div>

When I'm loading this with soup, it converts it into 

<div class="class_with spaces">Content 1</div>

How can I preserve spaces while using beautiful soup?


I really appreciate any help is provided.

[leonardr]

The default Beautiful Soup behavior when parsing HTML is to treat the 'class' attribute as a multi-valued attribute, and split its string value on whitespace to create a list of values. The HTML5 spec calls this a "set of space-separated tokens" and says that the whitespace isn't relevant.

The simplest way to stop Beautiful Soup from treating the 'class' attribute as a multi-valued attribute is to turn off multi-valued attributes altogether, which you can do by passing multi_valued_attributes=None into the BeautifulSoup constructor:

>>> from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
>>> markup = '<div class="class_with         spaces">Content 1</div>'
>>> BeautifulSoup(markup)

<div class="class_with spaces">Content 1</div>

>>> BeautifulSoup(markup, multi_valued_attributes=None)

<div class="class_with         spaces">Content 1</div>

The documentation on multi-valued attributes has a bit more information if you need finer-grained control than this.

Leonard