Finding a span tag with a ‘variable’? but no class – Beautiful soup/Python

I am using BeautifulSoup and Python to find a span tag that doesnt seem to have a class.

I am wanting to get the text “1hr ago” in the span tag, it has a… Variable? called “data-automation” but I can’t seem to find out how to find that using beautiful soup.

The first span has a class of “_3mgsa7- _2CsjSEq _2gpxOIH _15GBVuT _3VdCwhL _2Ryjovs” which does produce the text using my code but it also has an error.

can anyone help me fix the error or explain how I would find the “data-automation” span tag?

MY CODE:

joblist =soup.find_all('article', class_='_37iADb_ _3BsYYYt')
for job in joblist:
    listed = job.find('span', class_="_3mgsa7- _2CsjSEq _2gpxOIH _15GBVuT _3VdCwhL _2Ryjovs").text
    print(f'listed {listed}')

ERROR:

  Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "C:UsersUserPycharmProjectsScraping1ScrapeTut 2 - scraping websites.py", line 34, in <module>
        listed = job.find('span', class_="_3mgsa7- _2CsjSEq _2gpxOIH _15GBVuT _3VdCwhL _2Ryjovs").text
    AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'text'

WEBSITE HTML CODE:

<span class="_3mgsa7- _2CsjSEq _2gpxOIH _15GBVuT _3VdCwhL _2Ryjovs">
  <span class="">
    <span aria-hidden="true" data-automation="jobListingDate">1h ago</span>
  </span>
</span>

Answer

You can select a <span> element with a specific attribute (such as data-automation) by passing an attrs dict as a keyword argument to .find() or .find_all(). See the documentation.

To find <span>‘s where data-automation has any value:

soup.find('span', attrs={'data-automation': True})

Where data-automation has a specific value:

soup.find('span', attrs={'data-automation': 'jobListingDate'})