Custom indent width for BeautifulSoup .prettify()
Is there any way to define custom indent width for .prettify() function? From what I can get from it's source -
def prettify(self, encoding=None, formatter="minimal"):
if encoding is None:
return self.decode(True, formatter=formatter)
else:
return self.encode(encoding, True, formatter=formatter)
There is no way to specify indent width. I think it's because of this line in the decode_contents() function -
s.append(" " * (indent_level - 1))
Which has a fixed length of 1 space! (WHY!!) I tried specifying indent_level=4, that just results in this -
<section>
<article>
<h1>
</h1>
<p>
</p>
</article>
</section>
Which looks just plain stupid. :|
Now, I can hack this away, but I just want to be sure if there is anything I'm missing. Because this should be a basic feature. :-/
If you have some better way of prettifying HTML codes, let me know.
Answer
I actually dealt with this myself, in the hackiest way possible: by post-processing the result.
r = re.compile(r'^(\s*)', re.MULTILINE)
def prettify_2space(s, encoding=None, formatter="minimal"):
return r.sub(r'\1\1', s.prettify(encoding, formatter))
Actually, I monkeypatched prettify_2space in place of prettify in the class. That's not essential to the solution, but let's do it anyway, and make the indent width a parameter instead of hardcoding it to 2:
orig_prettify = bs4.BeautifulSoup.prettify
r = re.compile(r'^(\s*)', re.MULTILINE)
def prettify(self, encoding=None, formatter="minimal", indent_width=4):
return r.sub(r'\1' * indent_width, orig_prettify(self, encoding, formatter))
bs4.BeautifulSoup.prettify = prettify
So:
x = '''<section><article><h1></h1><p></p></article></section>'''
soup = bs4.BeautifulSoup(x)
print(soup.prettify(indent_width=3))
… gives:
<html>
<body>
<section>
<article>
<h1>
</h1>
<p>
</p>
</article>
</section>
</body>
</html>
Obviously if you want to patch Tag.prettify as well as BeautifulSoup.prettify, you have to do the same thing there. (You might want to create a generic wrapper that you can apply to both, instead of repeating yourself.) And if there are any other prettify methods, same deal.