[FIXED] can someone explain this append() part of a for loop?

Issue

I found this code on someone else's github, and am slightly adapting it. The notebook is meant to scrape data from a website. I've passed the contents of the website through an html parser, Here's some code with the loop:

players = soup.find_all("td", class_ = "player")
player_list = []
for player in players[0:52]:
      player_list.append(player.a.text)

I just don't understand why adding the .a.text changes player_list compared to just having append(player) in the for loop. I can't find anything about

Example of output from just append(player):

<td class="player"><span style="display:none">Smith</span>
 <a href="https://www.example.com">Brian Smith</a>
 </td>,

Output from append(player.a.text):

'Brian Smith',

Solution

find_all returns a list of tags. Since this returns a list, there's really no reason to append to anything else.

The dot-operator iterates through children of those tags, and .text accesses the non-HTML portion within the anchor (a) tag (plaintext).

Therefore, you get a list of Python strings. Which you could also get from

player_list = [player.a.text for player in soup.find_all("td", class_="player")]
first_52_players = player_list[:52]

Answered By - OneCricketeer