tags:

views:

136

answers:

1
+1  Q: 

Get document DOCTYPE with BeautifulSoup

I've just started tinkering with scrapy in conjunction with BeautifulSoup and I'm wondering if I'm missing something very obvious but I can't seem to figure out how to get the doctype of a returned html document from the resulting soup object.

Given the fllowing html:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd"&gt;
<html lang="en"> 
<head> 
<meta charset=utf-8 />
<meta name="viewport" content="width=620" />
<title>HTML5 Demos and Examples</title> 
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/html5demos.css" type="text/css" /> 
<script src="js/h5utils.js"></script> 
</head> 
<body>
<p id="firstpara" align="center">This is paragraph <b>one</b>
<p id="secondpara" align="blah">This is paragraph <b>two</b>.
</html>

Can anyone tell me if there's a way of extracting the declared doctype from it using BeautifulSoup?

Cheers.

+1  A: 

You could just fetch the first item in soup contents:

>>> soup.contents[0]
u'DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd"'
miles82  2010-03-23 19:53:40

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