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:

Answer 1

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