I have the script below, which modifies href
attributes in an HTML file (in the future, it will be a list of HTML files in a directory). Using BeautifulSoup I managed to access the tag values and modify them like I want, but I don't know how to save back the changes made to the file.
import os
import re
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
htmlDoc = open('adding_computer_c.html',"r+")
soup = BeautifulSoup(htmlDoc)
replacements= [ ('_', '-'), ('../tasks/', prefixUrl), ('../concepts/', prefixUrl) ]
for link in soup.findAll('a', attrs={'href': re.compile("../")}):
newlink=str(link)
for k, v in replacements:
newlink = newlink.replace(k, v)
extrachars=newlink[newlink.find("."):newlink.find(">")]
newlink=newlink.replace(extrachars,'')
link=newlink
print(link)
##How do I save the link I have modified back to the HTML file?
print(soup)##prints the original html tree
htmlDoc.close()
newlink = link['href']
# .. make replacements
link['href'] = newlink # store it back
Now print(soup.prettify())
will show changed links. To save the changes to a file:
htmlDoc.close()
html = soup.prettify("utf-8")
with open("output.html", "wb") as file:
file.write(html)
To preserve original character encoding of the document, you could use soup.original_encoding
instead of "utf-8". See Encodings.