Parsing HTML using Python

Question

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    lt html gt   lt head gt Heading lt  head gt   lt body attr1  val1  gt       lt div class  container  gt           lt div id  class  gt Something here lt  div gt           lt div gt Something else lt  div gt       lt  div gt   lt  body gt   lt  html gt    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

User · Answer

I recommend lxml for parsing HTML  See  Parsing HTML   on the lxml site    In my experience Beautiful Soup messes up on some complex HTML  I believe that is because Beautiful Soup is not a parser  rather a very good string analyzer

User · Answer

I would use EHP  https   github com iogf ehp  Here it is   from ehp import    doc       lt html gt   lt head gt Heading lt  head gt   lt body attr1  val1  gt       lt div class  container  gt           lt div id  class  gt Something here lt  div gt           lt div gt Something else lt  div gt       lt  div gt   lt  body gt   lt  html gt       html   Html   dom   html feed doc  for ind in dom find  div     class    container         print ind text     Output   Something here Something else

User · Answer

So that I can 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

User · Answer

Compared to the other parser libraries lxml is extremely fast    http   blog dispatched ch 2010 08 16 beautifulsoup-vs-lxml-performance  http   www ianbicking org blog 2008 03 python-html-parser-performance html   And with cssselect it   s quite easy to use for scraping HTML pages too   from lxml html import parse doc   parse  http   www google com   getroot   for div in doc cssselect  a        print   s   s     div text content    div get  href      lxml html Documentation

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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 id     or     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

User · Answer

I recommend using justext library   https   github com miso-belica jusText  Usage   Python2   import requests import justext  response   requests get  http   planet python org    paragraphs   justext justext response content  justext get stoplist  English    for paragraph in paragraphs      print paragraph text   Python3    import requests import justext  response   requests get  http   bbc com    paragraphs   justext justext response content  justext get stoplist  English    for paragraph in paragraphs      print  paragraph text

[python] Parsing HTML using Python

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