Beautiful Soup Error: '' Object Has No Attribute 'contents'?

I'm writing a script that extracts the content out of an article and removes any unnecessary stuff eg. scripts and styling. Beautiful Soup keeps raising the following exception: '&

Solution 1:

I think the problem is that in remove_all_elements or somewhere else in your code you are deleting the contents attribute of some of your tags.

It looks like this is happening when you call to_remove.decompose(). Here is the source for that method:

defdecompose(self):
    """Recursively destroys the contents of this tree."""
    self.extract()
    i = self
    while i isnotNone:
        next = i.next_element
        i.__dict__.clear()
        i = next

Here is what happens if you call this function manually:

>> soup = BeautifulSoup('<div><p>hi</p></div>')
>>>d0 = soup.find_all('div')[0]>>>d0
<div><p>hi</p></div>
>>>d0.decompose()>>>d0
Traceback (most recent call last):
...
Traceback (most recent call last):
AttributeError: '<class 'bs4.element.Tag'>' object has no attribute 'contents'

It appears that once you have called decompose on a tag you must never attempt to use that tag again. I'm not quite sure where this is happening though.

One thing I would try checking is that len(element.__dict__) > 0 at all times in your trim() function.