Comment 5 for bug 1768330

Another way of doing this would be to use currently unused operators for this purpose. Then you could get syntax like:

soup % 'a' / 'href'

This avoids most of the problems I mentioned, but most of the currently unused operators are math operators. There's no intuitive connection between the meaning of the operator and what the operator does to a Tag or a ResultSet. It could just as easily look like this:

soup / 'a' % 'href'

So the resulting system would be hard to learn and remember. The dot operator (generally used to move from a Python object to one of its attributes) and the square-brackets operator (generally used to index a Python array or dictionary) don't have this problem. Their Beautiful Soup uses are similar to their normal Python uses.

Overall I think list comprehensions are the right tool for this sort of thing -- that's the syntax the Python devs came up with and even if I could do slightly better, the fact that it's different from normal Python would itself be a negative.