find() vs find_all()

BeautifulSoup gives you two main search methods. Use find() when you want one element, find_all() when you want many.

soup.find("p")      # Returns first <p> element
soup.find_all("p")  # Returns list of ALL <p> elements

find() returns a single element (or None if not found). find_all() always returns a list (possibly empty).

This matters when you're looping:

# Get all links on a page
links = soup.find_all("a")
for link in links:
    print(link.text)

A common pattern: use find() to locate a container, then find_all() to get items inside it:

table = soup.find("table")
rows = table.find_all("tr")

This two-step approach is essential for real scraping tasks.

Master these patterns in my Web Scraping course.