Parsing HTML to get text inside an element
I need to get the text inside the two elements into a string:
source_code = """<span class="UserName"><a href="#">Martin Elias</a></span>"""
>>> text
'Martin Elias'
How could I achieve this?
Answer
I searched "python parse html" and this was the first result: https://docs.python.org/2/library/htmlparser.html
This code is taken from the python docs
from HTMLParser import HTMLParser
# create a subclass and override the handler methods
class MyHTMLParser(HTMLParser):
def handle_starttag(self, tag, attrs):
print "Encountered a start tag:", tag
def handle_endtag(self, tag):
print "Encountered an end tag :", tag
def handle_data(self, data):
print "Encountered some data :", data
# instantiate the parser and fed it some HTML
parser = MyHTMLParser()
parser.feed('<html><head><title>Test</title></head>'
'<body><h1>Parse me!</h1></body></html>')
Here is the result:
Encountered a start tag: html
Encountered a start tag: head
Encountered a start tag: title
Encountered some data : Test
Encountered an end tag : title
Encountered an end tag : head
Encountered a start tag: body
Encountered a start tag: h1
Encountered some data : Parse me!
Encountered an end tag : h1
Encountered an end tag : body
Encountered an end tag : html
Using this and by looking at the code in HTMLParser I came up with this:
class myhtmlparser(HTMLParser):
def __init__(self):
self.reset()
self.NEWTAGS = []
self.NEWATTRS = []
self.HTMLDATA = []
def handle_starttag(self, tag, attrs):
self.NEWTAGS.append(tag)
self.NEWATTRS.append(attrs)
def handle_data(self, data):
self.HTMLDATA.append(data)
def clean(self):
self.NEWTAGS = []
self.NEWATTRS = []
self.HTMLDATA = []
You can use it like this:
from HTMLParser import HTMLParser
pstring = source_code = """<span class="UserName"><a href="#">Martin Elias</a></span>"""
class myhtmlparser(HTMLParser):
def __init__(self):
self.reset()
self.NEWTAGS = []
self.NEWATTRS = []
self.HTMLDATA = []
def handle_starttag(self, tag, attrs):
self.NEWTAGS.append(tag)
self.NEWATTRS.append(attrs)
def handle_data(self, data):
self.HTMLDATA.append(data)
def clean(self):
self.NEWTAGS = []
self.NEWATTRS = []
self.HTMLDATA = []
parser = myhtmlparser()
parser.feed(pstring)
# Extract data from parser
tags = parser.NEWTAGS
attrs = parser.NEWATTRS
data = parser.HTMLDATA
# Clean the parser
parser.clean()
# Print out our data
print tags
print attrs
print data
Now you should be able to extract your data from those lists easily. I hope this helped!