What's my best bet for parsing HTML if I can't use BeautifulSoup or lxml? I've got some code that uses SGMLlib but it's a bit low-level and it's now deprecated.
I would prefer if it could stomache a bit of malformed HTML although I'm pretty sure most of the input will be pretty clean.
http://www.xmlhack.com/read.php?item=1392 http://sourceforge.net/projects/pirxx/
http://pyxml.sourceforge.net/topics/
I don't have much experience with python, but I have used Xerces (from the Apache foundation) in the past and found it to be very useful. The learning curve isn't bad either, though I'm not coming from a python perspective. I suggest you consider it though. (The first two links I've included discuss python interfaces to Xerces and the last one is the first google hit on "python xml").
Why can't you use BeautifulSoup? It's a simple one-file python-module, so if you don't get it "installed", just copy-and-paste it's contents into your actual script.
Python has a native HTML parser, however the Tidy wrapper Nick suggested would probably be a solid choice as well. Tidy is a very common library, (written in C is it?)