python - Bs4 select_one vs find

Question

I was wondering what is the difference between performing bs.find('div') and bs.select_one('div'). Same goes for find_all and select.

Is there any difference performance wise, or if any is better to use over the other in specific cases.

Answer 1

select() and select_one() give you a different way navigating through an HTML tree using the CSS selectors which has rich and convenient syntax. Though, the CSS selector syntax support in BeautifulSoup is limited but covers most common cases.

Performance-wise, it really depends on an HTML tree to parse and on which element, how deep is it and what selector is used to locate it. Plus, what find() + find_all() alternative there is to compare the select() with, is also important. In a simple case like bs.find('div') vs bs.select_one('div'), I'd say that, generally, find() should perform faster simply because there is a lot going on to support CSS selector syntax under-the-hood.