Using the Python Documentation I found the HTML parser but I have no idea which library to import to use it, how do I find this out (bearing in mind it doesn't say on the page).
+1
A:
There's a link to an example on the bottom of the page.
Vytautas Shaltenis
2008-09-16 10:52:39
+12
A:
You probably really want BeautifulSoup, check the link for an example.
But in any case
>>> import HTMLParser
>>> h = HTMLParser.HTMLParser()
>>> h.feed('<html></html>')
>>> h.get_starttag_text()
'<html>'
>>> h.close()
Vinko Vrsalovic
2008-09-16 10:54:05
+2
A:
I would recommend using Beautiful Soup module instead and it has good documentation.
Swaroop C H
2008-09-16 10:54:21
I'm gonna give it a whirl, thanks for the suggestion
Teifion
2008-09-16 10:56:27
+1
A:
For real world HTML processing I'd recommend BeautifulSoup. It is great and takes away much of the pain. Installation is easy.
Antti Rasinen
2008-09-16 10:55:20
+1
A:
You should also look at html5lib for Python as it tries to parse HTML in a way that very much resembles what web browsers do, especially when dealing with invalid HTML (which is more than 90% of today's web).
Alexey Feldgendler
2008-09-16 12:14:04
+2
A:
I don't recommend BeautifulSoup if you want speed. lxml is much, much faster, and you can fall back in lxml's BS soupparser if the default parser doesn't work.
Koh Wei Jie
2008-09-16 13:21:55
I agree, BeautifulSoup is only useful when parsing a handful of files, there are too many memoryleaks.
DrDee
2010-09-16 15:51:49
+2
A:
You may be interested in lxml. It is a separate package and has C components, but is the fastest. It has also very nice API, allowing you to easily list links in HTML documents, or list forms, sanitize HTML, and more. It also has capabilities to parse not well-formed HTML (it's configurable).
phjr
2008-09-17 11:19:11