clone element with beautifulsoup

There is no native clone function in BeautifulSoup in versions before 4.4
(released July 2015); you’d have to create a deep copy yourself, which is
tricky as each element maintains links to the rest of the tree.

To clone an element and all its elements, you’d have to copy all attributes
and reset their parent-child relationships; this has to happen recursively.
This is best done by not copying the relationship attributes and re-seat each
recursively-cloned element:

from bs4 import Tag, NavigableStringdef clone(el):    if isinstance(el, NavigableString):        return type(el)(el)    copy = Tag(None, el.builder, el.name, el.namespace, el.nsprefix)    # work around bug where there is no builder set    # https://bugs.launchpad.net/beautifulsoup/+bug/1307471    copy.attrs = dict(el.attrs)    for attr in ('can_be_empty_element', 'hidden'):        setattr(copy, attr, getattr(el, attr))    for child in el.contents:        copy.append(clone(child))    return copy

This method is kind-of sensitive to the current BeautifulSoup version; I
tested this with 4.3, future versions may add attributes that need to be
copied too.

You could also monkeypatch this functionality into BeautifulSoup:

from bs4 import Tag, NavigableStringdef tag_clone(self):    copy = type(self)(None, self.builder, self.name, self.namespace, self.nsprefix)    # work around bug where there is no builder set    # https://bugs.launchpad.net/beautifulsoup/+bug/1307471    copy.attrs = dict(self.attrs)    for attr in ('can_be_empty_element', 'hidden'):        setattr(copy, attr, getattr(self, attr))    for child in self.contents:        copy.append(child.clone())    return copyTag.clone = tag_cloneNavigableString.clone = lambda self: type(self)(self)

letting you call

.clone()

document2.body.append(document1.find('div', id_='someid').clone())

My feature request to
the BeautifulSoup project was accepted and
tweaked
to use the

copy.copy()

import copydocument2.body.append(copy.copy(document1.find('div', id_='someid')))