I am parsing an html document using the http://lxml.de/ library. So far I have figured out how to strip tags from an html document In lxml, how do I remove a tag but retain
Here are some examples of how to remove and parse different types of HTML elements from a XML/HTML tree.
KEY SUGGESTION: Its helpful to NOT depend on external libraries and do everything within "native python 2/3 code".
Here are some examples of how to do this with "native" python...
# (REMOVE <SCRIPT> to </script> and variations)
pattern = r'<[ ]*script.*?\/[ ]*script[ ]*>' # mach any char zero or more times
text = re.sub(pattern, '', text, flags=(re.IGNORECASE | re.MULTILINE | re.DOTALL))
# (REMOVE HTML <STYLE> to </style> and variations)
pattern = r'<[ ]*style.*?\/[ ]*style[ ]*>' # mach any char zero or more times
text = re.sub(pattern, '', text, flags=(re.IGNORECASE | re.MULTILINE | re.DOTALL))
# (REMOVE HTML <META> to </meta> and variations)
pattern = r'<[ ]*meta.*?>' # mach any char zero or more times
text = re.sub(pattern, '', text, flags=(re.IGNORECASE | re.MULTILINE | re.DOTALL))
# (REMOVE HTML COMMENTS <!-- to --> and variations)
pattern = r'<[ ]*!--.*?--[ ]*>' # mach any char zero or more times
text = re.sub(pattern, '', text, flags=(re.IGNORECASE | re.MULTILINE | re.DOTALL))
# (REMOVE HTML DOCTYPE <!DOCTYPE html to > and variations)
pattern = r'<[ ]*\![ ]*DOCTYPE.*?>' # mach any char zero or more times
text = re.sub(pattern, '', text, flags=(re.IGNORECASE | re.MULTILINE | re.DOTALL))
NOTE:
re.IGNORECASE # is needed to match case sensitive <script> or <SCRIPT> or <Script>
re.MULTILINE # is needed to match newlines
re.DOTALL # is needed to match "special characters" and match "any character"
I've tested this out on several different HTML files and including , , and and it works "fast" and works across newlines!..
NOTE: It also does NOT depend on beautifulsoup or any other external downloaded library!
Hope this helps!
:)
Below is an example to do what you want. For an HTML document, Cleaner
is a better general solution to the problem than using strip_elements
, because in cases like this you want to strip out more than just the <script>
tag; you also want to get rid of things like onclick=function()
attributes on other tags.
#!/usr/bin/env python
import lxml
from lxml.html.clean import Cleaner
cleaner = Cleaner()
cleaner.javascript = True # This is True because we want to activate the javascript filter
cleaner.style = True # This is True because we want to activate the styles & stylesheet filter
print("WITH JAVASCRIPT & STYLES")
print(lxml.html.tostring(lxml.html.parse('http://www.google.com')))
print("WITHOUT JAVASCRIPT & STYLES")
print(lxml.html.tostring(cleaner.clean_html(lxml.html.parse('http://www.google.com'))))
You can get a list of the options you can set in the lxml.html.clean.Cleaner documentation; some options you can just set to True
or False
(the default) and others take a list like:
cleaner.kill_tags = ['a', 'h1']
cleaner.remove_tags = ['p']
Note that the difference between kill vs remove:
remove_tags:
A list of tags to remove. Only the tags will be removed, their content will get pulled up into the parent tag.
kill_tags:
A list of tags to kill. Killing also removes the tag's content, i.e. the whole subtree, not just the tag itself.
allow_tags:
A list of tags to include (default include all).
You can use the strip_elements method to remove scripts, then use strip_tags method to remove other tags:
etree.strip_elements(fragment, 'script')
etree.strip_tags(fragment, 'a', 'p') # and other tags that you want to remove
You can use bs4 libray also for this purpose.
soup = BeautifulSoup(html_src, "lxml")
[x.extract() for x in soup.findAll(['script', 'style'])]