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:
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')
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
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.
I would use EHP
https://github.com/iogf/ehp
Here it is:
from ehp import *
doc = '''<html>
<head>Heading</head>
<body attr1='val1'>
<div class='container'>
<div id='class'>Something here</div>
<div>Something else</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>
'''
html = Html()
dom = html.feed(doc)
for ind in dom.find('div', ('class', 'container')):
print ind.text()
Output:
Something here
Something else
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)
Compared to the other parser libraries lxml
is extremely fast:
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