Ignoring Specific Paragraphs or Divs in Web Scraping with LangChain
Labels: name: area: doc loader, name: auto:improvement

### Feature request

## Context:

I am currently developing a custom scraper using the LangChain tools, following the provided documentation. The core functionality involves extracting paragraphs from a list of URLs using the AsyncHtmlLoader and the Beautiful Soup transformer:

loader = AsyncHtmlLoader(urls)
docs = loader.load()
docs_transformed = self.bs_transformer.transform_documents(docs, tags_to_extract=["p"])
return docs_transformed

## Problem:

The code successfully extracts all paragraphs from the provided URLs. However, in the case of web pages like https://www.aha.org/news/chairpersons-file/2023-12-18-chair-file-leadership-dialogue-reflecting-whats-next-health-care-joanne-conroy-md-dartmouth, there is a recurring issue. At the end of each blog or news article, there is a disclaimer message paragraph:

"Noncommercial use of original content on www.aha.org is granted to AHA Institutional Members, their employees and State, Regional and Metro Hospital Associations unless otherwise indicated. AHA does not claim ownership of any content, including content incorporated by permission into AHA produced materials, created by any third party and cannot grant permission to use, distribute or otherwise reproduce such third party content. To request permission to reproduce AHA content, please [click here](https://askrc.libraryresearch.info/reft100.aspx?key=ExtPerm).
"

## Proposed Solution:

To address this, I explored options and realized that excluding specific parts of the HTML could be a viable solution. Typically, using Beautiful Soup, I can delete specific paragraphs within a div by targeting the class parameter, as demonstrated here:

soup.find('div', class_='aha-footer')

## Issue with LangChain Implementation:

Upon inspecting the beautiful_soup_transformer.py in the LangChain repository, particularly the remove_unwanted_tags method, I observed that it is currently implemented to remove unwanted tags in a general sense:

soup = BeautifulSoup(html_content, "html.parser")
        for tag in unwanted_tags:
            for element in soup.find_all(tag):
                element.decompose()
        return str(soup)
        
This implementation makes it impossible to selectively eliminate specific divs from the HTML.

## Request for Guidance:

I seek guidance on how to ignore specific paragraphs or divs during web scraping with LangChain, particularly to exclude the recurring disclaimer paragraph mentioned above. I would appreciate any recommendations on the recommended approach or if there are plans to enhance the beautiful_soup_transformer.py to accommodate more granular exclusion of HTML elements.

### Motivation

I am performing web scrapping over this specific web page:
https://www.aha.org/news/chairpersons-file/2023-12-18-chair-file-leadership-dialogue-reflecting-whats-next-health-care-joanne-conroy-md-dartmouth

I am extracting all the paragraphs , but at the end of all blogs, news there is a disclaimer message paragraph:

Noncommercial use of original content on www.aha.org is granted to AHA Institutional Members, their employees and State, Regional and Metro Hospital Associations unless otherwise indicated. AHA does not claim ownership of any content, including content incorporated by permission into AHA produced materials, created by any third party and cannot grant permission to use, distribute or otherwise reproduce such third party content. To request permission to reproduce AHA content, please [click here](https://askrc.libraryresearch.info/reft100.aspx?key=ExtPerm).


so I want to ignore that specific paragraph

### Your contribution

not yet