How to Fix an HTML Error When Accessing Elements by Class in BeautifulSoup
Have you ever tried parsing HTML using BeautifulSoup and suddenly got slapped with an error like this?
KeyError: 'class'Yep, it happened to me too and at first, I couldn’t understand what I did wrong. So today, I’m breaking it down in the simplest way possible so you never get stuck on this again.
Understand the Error
Here’s the exact code I started with:
soup = BeautifulSoup(sdata)
mydivs = soup.findAll('div')
for div in mydivs:
if (div["class"] == "stylelistrow"):
print(div)And here’s the error Python threw at me:
KeyError: 'class'Why Does This Happen
Not all <div> elements in the HTML have a class attribute. When I try to access div["class"], Python behaves just like a dictionary if the key doesn’t exist, it throws a KeyError.
It’s the same as trying to do this:
my_dict = {}
print(my_dict["name"]) # Boom! KeyError: 'name'
So the solution is simple: don’t assume every element has a class — check first.
Correct and Safer Version
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
soup = BeautifulSoup(sdata, "html.parser")
mydivs = soup.find_all('div')
for div in mydivs:
if div.get("class") == ["stylelistrow"]: # Note: class returns a list
print(div)Why this works
.get("class") returns None instead of crashing if the element doesn’t have a class.
BeautifulSoup treats class as a list, so I compare it to ["stylelistrow"] instead of "stylelistrow".
Better & Cleaner Version
BeautifulSoup is smarter than we think it can filter elements by class directly.
for div in soup.find_all("div", class_="stylelistrow"):
print(div)This is clean, readable, and the recommended way to search by class.
Practice Project Extract & Save Matching Elements
To make things more practical, I expanded the code with additional features like counting elements and saving results to a file.
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
# Example HTML for testing
sdata = """
<html>
<body>
<div class="stylelistrow">Row 1</div>
<div class="stylelistrow">Row 2</div>
<div>No Class Div</div>
<div class="anotherclass">Other Div</div>
</body>
</html>
"""
soup = BeautifulSoup(sdata, "html.parser")
# 1. Print all matching divs
print("Divs with class='stylelistrow':")
for div in soup.find_all("div", class_="stylelistrow"):
print(" -", div.text)
# 2. Count them
count = len(soup.find_all("div", class_="stylelistrow"))
print("\nTotal matched divs:", count)
# 3. Store them in a list
matched_texts = [div.text for div in soup.find_all("div", class_="stylelistrow")]
print("\nList of extracted texts:", matched_texts)
# 4. Save them to a file for practice
with open("output.txt", "w") as f:
f.write("\n".join(matched_texts))
print("\nSaved to output.txt")
Final Thought
Errors like KeyError: 'class' may seem intimidating at first, but they’re simply reminders to write safer and more flexible code. Once I learned to check for missing attributes instead of assuming everything exists, my scraping scripts became far more reliable. Always code defensively trust the data only after you verify it.