How Can I Parse HTML and Access Elements Using Python?

Parsing HTML with Python

Question:

How can I access and manipulate HTML elements using a Python parser? I need a module that allows me to get tags and their content in a structured format, similar to the nested structure displayed in Firefox's "Inspect element" feature.

Answer:

BeautifulSoup

The BeautifulSoup module is a popular and powerful Python library for parsing HTML. It can convert HTML into a nested data structure, allowing you to access and navigate HTML elements easily.

Example:

To parse the HTML document you provided:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

html = "Heading<div class="container"><div>
<p>To get the content of the "container" div within the "body" tag:</p>
<pre class="brush:php;toolbar:false">print(parsed_html.body.find('div', attrs={'class':'container'}).text)

Other Options:

• lxml: A fast and efficient XML and HTML parser that supports advanced features such as XPath.
• HTMLParser: A built-in Python module that provides a basic HTML parser.