CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonlxml
Programmer
Programmer

Reputation: 6753

Parsing HTML documents using lxml in python

I just downloaded lxml to parse broken HTML documents. I was reading through the documentation of lxml but could not find that given a HTML document, how do we just retrieve the text in the document using lxml. I will be obliged if someone could help me with this.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 298

Answers (1)

Steve Mayne
Steve Mayne

Reputation: 22868

It's very simple:

from lxml import html
html_document = ... #Get your document contents here from a file or whatever

tree = html.fromstring(html_document)
text_document = tree.text_content()

If you only want the content from specific blocks (e.g. the body block), then you can access them using xpath expressions:

body_tags = tree.xpath('//body')
if body_tags:
  body = body_tags[0]
  text_document = body.text_content()
else:
  text_document = ''

Upvotes: 1

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