Note 13.12.1.
The XML format is described in the next chapter.
Section 13.12 Parsing HTML using BeautifulSoup
Even though HTML looks like XML and some pages are carefully constructed to be XML, most HTML is generally broken in ways that cause an XML parser to reject the entire page of HTML as improperly formed.
There are a number of Python libraries which can help you parse HTML and extract data from the pages. Each of the libraries has its strengths and weaknesses and you can pick one based on your needs.
As an example, we will simply parse some HTML input and extract links using the BeautifulSoup library. BeautifulSoup tolerates highly flawed HTML and still lets you easily extract the data you need. You can download and install the BeautifulSoup code from:
Information on installing BeautifulSoup with the Python Package Index tool
pip is available at:
We will use
urllib to read the page and then use BeautifulSoup to extract the href attributes from the anchor (a) tags.
The program prompts for a web address, then opens the web page, reads the data and passes the data to the BeautifulSoup parser, and then retrieves all of the anchor tags and prints out the
href attribute for each tag.
This list is much longer because some HTML anchor tags are relative paths (e.g., tutorial/index.html) or in-page references (e.g., ‘#’) that do not include “http://” or “https://”, which was a requirement in our regular expression.
You can use also BeautifulSoup to pull out various parts of each tag:
html.parser is the HTML parser included in the standard Python 3 library. Information on other HTML parsers is available at:
These examples only begin to show the power of BeautifulSoup when it comes to parsing HTML.
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