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@bradmontgomery
Created November 11, 2010 23:12
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A way to remove all HTML attributes with BeautifulSoup
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
def _remove_attrs(soup):
for tag in soup.findAll(True):
tag.attrs = None
return soup
def example():
doc = '<html><head><title>test</title></head><body id="foo" onload="whatever"><p class="whatever">junk</p><div style="background: yellow;" id="foo" class="blah">blah</div></body></html>'
print 'Before:\n%s' % doc
soup = BeautifulSoup(doc)
clean_soup = _remove_attrs(soup)
print '\nAfter:\n%s' % clean_soup
@jimbaldwin123
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If you have more than one attribute in a tag, this won't work, because del t[attr] truncates the list and ends the loop prematurely.

change
for attr, val in t.attrs:

to
for attr, val in reversed(t.attrs):

and that will fix it.

@bradmontgomery
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Author

Just updated the gist. I discovered that you can use soup to find all Tags, and that settings a Tag's attr property to None will effectively remove it. I think this works, but YMMV.

@kavinyao
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kavinyao commented Sep 2, 2012

Setting tag.attrs to None would be too brute, resulting in error if you use find() or select() on the tree later.

The better way is: tag.attrs = {}

@f126ck
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f126ck commented Feb 2, 2017

How can I remove all tags except those in a whitelist?
If in whitelist there are 'a' and 'img' tag, how can remove all tags(<script>

...) but keeping links and images?

@revotu
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revotu commented Jul 14, 2017

@stefkes
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stefkes commented Aug 15, 2018

This gives errors with Python 3: too many values to unpack

@JohnDotOwl
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Is there any way to remove specific attributes?

@WNiels
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WNiels commented Nov 11, 2019

How can I remove all tags except those in a whitelist?
If in whitelist there are 'a' and 'img' tag, how can remove all tags(<script>

...) but keeping links and images?

for k in list(tag.attrs.keys()):
            print(k)
            if k not in attr_whitelist:
                tag.attrs.pop(k, None)

@edif
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edif commented Dec 26, 2019

This gist is a bit old but why not use the clear() function!?

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

result = requests.get('https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/HyperText_Markup_Language/Introduction')
src = result.content
doc = BeautifulSoup(src, features="html.parser")
head_title = doc.find('h1', {'id': 'firstHeading'})

print(head_title)
head_title.attrs.clear()
print(head_title)

@sripriyesha
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clear() function works perfect! Thank you

@mzpqnxow
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mzpqnxow commented Nov 24, 2020

I ended up using the following to efficiently "blacklist" attributes from a tag in place (I needed to continue using the Tag after) which is all I needed to do in my case- the clear() method that @edif used seems to be the best way to remove all of the attributes, though I only needed to remove a subset

It's for the inverse of what @WNiels provided. I stumbled across this gist, curious about how BS Tag objects would handle having del used on them. Turns out it seems to handle them fine

This is what I did, it's relatively efficient which was important for me because it runs across a corpus of hundreds of thousands of HTML files. I included PEP-3107 type hints/annotations for clarity

def _filter_input_attr(tag: bs4.element.Tag) -> None:
    """Remove a subset of attributes from a bs4 Tag"""
    filter_attr_name_set = {'autocorrect', 'autofocus', 'border', 'disabled',
                            'height', 'incremental', 'list', 'max', 'maxsize',
                            'min', 'multiple', 'pattern', 'required', 'size',
                            'step', 'tabindex', 'width'}
    drop_key_set = set(tag.attrs) & filter_attr_name_set
    for key in drop_key_set:
        del tag.attrs[key]

...
soup = BeautifulSoup(open('sample.html'), features='lxml')
for form in soup.find_all('form'):
    filter_input_attr(form)
    print(form)
...

Example input tag:

<input autofocus="autofocus" class="std_textbox" id="user" name="user" placeholder="Enter your username." required="" tabindex="1" type="text" value=""/>

As dict_items (before):

dict_items([('name', 'user'), ('id', 'user'), ('autofocus', 'autofocus'), ('value', ''), ('placeholder', 'Enter your username.'), ('class', ['std_textbox']), ('type', 'text'), ('tabindex', '1'), ('required', '')])

As dict_items (after):

dict_items([('name', 'user'), ('id', 'user'), ('value', ''), ('placeholder', 'Enter your username.'), ('class', ['std_textbox']), ('type', 'text')])

EDIT/NOTE: In this particular example (<FORM>) only the <FORM> tag attributes will be cleaned up. You will need to use find_all explicitly on the list of form Tags if you want to perform the same filtering on, for example, the <INPUT> tags within the <FORM>

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