How can I use Python to get the contents inside of this span tag?

Question

I'm trying to scrape the information from Google Translate as a learning exercise and I can't figure out how to reach the content of this span tag.

<span title="Hello" onmouseover="this.style.backgroundColor='#ebeff9'"                                  
      onmouseout="this.style.backgroundColor='#fff'">
    Hallo
</span>

How would I use Python to reach into the contents. Since the 'title' parameter of this span is dynamic, I guess I can target that as a point of entry?

For example trying to translate: Hi, welcome to my house. Would you like a glass of tea or maybe some biscuits?

results in the following html output:

<span title="Hi, welcome to my house." 
onmouseover="this.style.backgroundColor='#ebeff9'" 
onmouseout="this.style.backgroundColor='#fff'">
    Hallo, mein Haus begrüßen zu dürfen. 
</span>

Answer 1

Checkout BeautifulSoup

Answer 2

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
def gettext(html):
    for sp in myhtml.split("</span>"):
       if "<span" in sp:
          return sp.rsplit(">")[-1].strip()

myhtml="""
<span title="Hello" onmouseover="this.style.backgroundColor='#ebeff9'"
      onmouseout="this.style.backgroundColor='#fff'">
    Hallo
</span>
"""

print gettext(myhtml)

myhtml="""
<span title="Hi, welcome to my house."
onmouseover="this.style.backgroundColor='#ebeff9'"
onmouseout="this.style.backgroundColor='#fff'">
    Hallo, mein Haus begrüßen zu dürfen.
</span>
"""

print gettext(myhtml)

output

$ python mytranslate.py
Hallo
Hallo, mein Haus begrüßen zu dürfen.

Answer 3

Python ships with a few XML and HTML parsers.

• Element Tree Parser
  • This is supposed to be the most pythonic method of parsing XML files.
  • xml.etree.ElementTree
• DOM XML Parsers
  • xml.dom
  • xml.dom.minidom
• SAX XML Parser
  • xml.sax
• Expat XML Parser
  • xml.parsers.expat
• Simple HTML and XHTML Parser
  • HTMLParser
• Third Party Parsers
  • If you don't like any of the parsers included with python.
  • lxml
  • BeautifulSoup

I would suggest that you look at the parsers that come with Python first, then look at third party parsers if you don't find any of the included modules acceptable.