Select All Divs Except Ones With Certain Classes In BeautifulSoup

As discussed in this question one can easily get all divs with certain classes. But here, I have a list of classes that I want to exclude & want to get all divs that doesn't ha

Solution 1:

Using CSS selector, try this:

divs = soup.select("div:not('.class1, .class2, .class3')")

Reference

1. Link 1
2. Link 2

Solution 2:

Alternate solution

soup.find_all('div', class_=lambda x: x not in classToIgnore)

Example

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
html = """
<div class="c1"></div>
<div class="c1"></div>
<div class="c2"></div>
<div class="c3"></div>
<div class="c4"></div>
"""
soup = BeautifulSoup(html, 'html.parser')
classToIgnore = ["c1", "c2"]
print(soup.find_all('div', class_=lambda x: x not in classToIgnore))

Output

[<div class="c3"></div>, <div class="c4"></div>]

If you are dealing with nested classes then try deleting the inner unwanted classes using decompose and then just find_all('div')

for div in soup.find_all('div', class_=lambda x: x in classToIgnore):
    div.decompose()
print(soup.find_all('div'))

This might leave some extra spaces but you can strip that off easily later.