The htmllib Module

The htmlib module contains a tag-driven HTML parser, which sends data to a formatting object. Example 5-9 uses this module. For more examples on how to parse HTML files using this module, see the descriptions of the formatter module.

Example 5-9. Using the htmllib Module

File: htmllib-example-1.py import htmllib import formatter import string class Parser(htmllib.HTMLParser): # return a dictionary mapping anchor texts to lists # of associated hyperlinks def _ _init_ _(self, verbose=0): self.anchors = {} f = formatter.NullFormatter() htmllib.HTMLParser._ _init_ _(self, f, verbose) def anchor_bgn(self, href, name, type): self.save_bgn() self.anchor = href def anchor_end(self): text = string.strip(self.save_end()) if self.anchor and text: self.anchors[text] = self.anchors.get(text, []) + [self.anchor] file = open("samples/sample.htm") html = file.read() file.close() p = Parser() p.feed(html) p.close() for k, v in p.anchors.items(): print k, "=>", v print link => ['http://www.python.org']

If you're only out to parse an HTML file and not render it to an output device, it's usually easier to use the sgmllib module instead.