CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonhtmldomparsing
Guy
Guy

Reputation: 14790

Is there a built in package to parse html into dom?

I found HTMLParser for SAX and xml.minidom for XML. I have a pretty well formed HTML so I don't need a too strong parser - any suggestions?

Upvotes: 51

Views: 59012

Answers (5)

Guido U. Draheim
Guido U. Draheim

Reputation: 3271

There is a trick using only python3 builtin functions (3.4+)

Use html.unescape to decode all html5 entitities. Then use html.escape to encode <>"& back to entities for the xml parser leaving the other entities as unicode characters in the string.

#! /usr/bin/python3
import re
import xml.dom.minidom
from html import escape, unescape

def minidom_parseHtml(text: str):
     "parse html text with non-xml html-entities as minidom"
     textXML = re.sub("\\&\\w+\\;", lambda x: escape(unescape(x.group(0))), text)
     return xml.dom.minidom.parseString(textXML)

Upvotes: 0

Joseph Sheedy
Joseph Sheedy

Reputation: 6726

BeautifulSoup and lxml are great, but not appropriate answers here since the question is about builtins. Here is an example of using the builtin minidom module to parse an HTML string. Tested with cPython 3.5.2:

from xml.dom.minidom import parseString

html_string = """
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html><head><title>title</title></head><body><p>test</p></body></html>
"""

# extract the text value of the document's <p> tag:
doc = parseString(html_string)
paragraph = doc.getElementsByTagName("p")[0]
content = paragraph.firstChild.data

print(content)

However, as indicated in Jesse Hogan's comment, this will fail on HTML entities not recognized by mindom. Here is an updated solution using the Python3 html.parser module:

from html.parser import HTMLParser

html_string = """
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html><head><title>title</title></head><body><p>&nbsp;test</p><div>not in p</div></body></html>
"""

class Parser(HTMLParser):
    def __init__(self):
        HTMLParser.__init__(self)
        self.in_p = []

    def handle_starttag(self, tag, attrs):
        if (tag == 'p'):
            self.in_p.append(tag)

    def handle_endtag(self, tag):
        if (tag == 'p'):
            self.in_p.pop()

    def handle_data(self, data):
        if self.in_p:
            print("<p> data :", data)

parser = Parser()
parser.feed(html_string)

Upvotes: 24

delta24
delta24

Reputation: 173

To handle DOM objects, you can use HTMLDOM for python.

Upvotes: 3

hughdbrown
hughdbrown

Reputation: 49013

I would recommend lxml. I like BeautifulSoup, but there are maintenance issues generally and compatibility issues with the later releases. I've been happy using lxml.

Later: the best recommendations are to use lxml, html5lib, or BeautifulSoup 3.0.8. BeautifulSoup 3.1.x is meant for python 3.x and is known to have problems with earlier python versions, as noted on the BeautifulSoup website.

Ian Bicking has a good article on using lxml.

ElementTree is a further recommendation, but I have never used it.

2012-01-18: someone has come by and decided to downvote me and Bartosz because we recommended python packages that are easily obtained but not part of the python distribution. So for the highly literal StackOverflowers: "You can use xml.dom.minidom, but no one will recommend this over the alternatives."

Upvotes: 30

Bartosz
Bartosz

Reputation: 6193

Take a look at BeautifulSoup. It's popular and excellent at parsing HTML.

Upvotes: 16

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