---
title: "Find all Headings with BeautifulSoup"
description: "BeautifulSoup is a DOM like library for python. It's quite useful to manipulate html. Here is an example to find_all html headings. I stole the regex from..."
date: 2022-02-01
published: false
tags:
- dev
- python
- webdev
template: til
---
BeautifulSoup is a DOM like library for python. It's quite useful to
manipulate html. Here is an example to find_all html headings. I stole
the regex from stack overflow, but who doesn't.
## Make an example
_sample.html_
Lets make a sample.html file with the following contents. It mainly has
some headings, `` and `` tags that I want to be able to find.
```html
hello
this is a paragraph
second heading
this is also a paragraph
third heading
this is the last paragraph
```
## Get the headings with BeautifulSoup
Lets import our packages, read in our `sample.html` using pathlib and find all
headings using BeautifulSoup.
```python
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
from pathlib import Path
soup = BeautifulSoup(Path('sample.html').read_text(), features="lxml")
headings = soup.find_all(re.compile("^h[1-6]$"))
```
And what we get is a list of `bs4.element.Tag`'s.
```python
>> print(headings)
[hello
, second heading
, third heading
]
```
I recently added a heading_link plugin to markata, you might notice the
🔗's next to each heading on this page, that is powered by this exact
technique.