Parsing HTML using Python
I'm looking for an HTML Parser module for Python that can help me get the tags in the form of Python lists/dictionaries/objects.
If I have a document of the form:
<html>
<head>Heading</head>
<body attr1='val1'>
<div class='container'>
<div id='class'>Something here</div>
<div>Something else</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>
then it should give me a way to access the nested tags via the name or id of the HTML tag so that I can basically ask it to get me the content/text in the div tag with class='container' contained within the body tag, or something similar.
If you've used Firefox's "Inspect element" feature (view HTML) you would know that it gives you all the tags in a nice nested manner like a tree.
I'd prefer a built-in module but that might be asking a little too much.
I went through a lot of questions on Stack Overflow and a few blogs on the internet and most of them suggest BeautifulSoup or lxml or HTMLParser but few of these detail the functionality and simply end as a debate over which one is faster/more efficent.
So that I can basically ask it to get me the content/text in the div tag with class='container' contained within the body tag, Or something similar.
try:
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
except ImportError:
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
html = #the HTML code you've written above
parsed_html = BeautifulSoup(html)
print parsed_html.body.find('div', attrs={'class':'container'}).text
You don't need performance descriptions I guess - just read how BeautifulSoup works. Look at its official documentation.
I guess what you're looking for is pyquery:
pyquery: a jquery-like library for python.
An example of what you want may be like:
from pyquery import PyQuery
html = # Your HTML CODE
pq = PyQuery(html)
tag = pq('div#class')
print tag.text()
And it uses the same selectors as Firefox's or Chrome's inspect element. For example:
The inspected element selector is 'div#mw-head.noprint'. So in pyquery, you just need to pass this selector:
pq('div#mw-head.noprint')
Here you can read more about different HTML parsers in Python and their performance. Even though the article is a bit dated it still gives you a good overview.
Python HTML parser performance
I'd recommend BeautifulSoup even though it isn't built in. Just because it's so easy to work with for those kinds of tasks. Eg:
import urllib2
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
page = urllib2.urlopen('http://www.google.com/')
soup = BeautifulSoup(page)
x = soup.body.find('div', attrs={'class' : 'container'}).text
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