Is there any Python library that allows me to parse an HTML document similar to what jQuery
does?
i.e. I\'d like to be able to use CSS selectors
If you are fluent with BeautifulSoup, you could just add soupselect to your libs.
Soupselect is a CSS selector extension for BeautifulSoup.
Usage:
>>> from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup as Soup
>>> from soupselect import select
>>> import urllib
>>> soup = Soup(urllib.urlopen('http://slashdot.org/'))
>>> select(soup, 'div.title h3')
[<h3><span><a href='//science.slashdot.org/'>Science</a>:</span></h3>,
<h3><a href='//slashdot.org/articles/07/02/28/0120220.shtml'>Star Trek</h3>,
..]
css selectors
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup as Soup
html = requests.get('https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3051295').content
soup = Soup(html)
Title of this question
soup.select('h1.grid--cell :first-child')[0].text
Number of question upvotes
# first item
soup.select_one('[itemprop="upvoteCount"]').text
using Python Requests to get the html page
The lxml library supports CSS selectors.
Consider PyQuery:
http://packages.python.org/pyquery/
>>> from pyquery import PyQuery as pq
>>> from lxml import etree
>>> import urllib
>>> d = pq("<html></html>")
>>> d = pq(etree.fromstring("<html></html>"))
>>> d = pq(url='http://google.com/')
>>> d = pq(url='http://google.com/', opener=lambda url: urllib.urlopen(url).read())
>>> d = pq(filename=path_to_html_file)
>>> d("#hello")
[<p#hello.hello>]
>>> p = d("#hello")
>>> p.html()
'Hello world !'
>>> p.html("you know <a href='http://python.org/'>Python</a> rocks")
[<p#hello.hello>]
>>> p.html()
u'you know <a href="http://python.org/">Python</a> rocks'
>>> p.text()
'you know Python rocks'