pullparser

A simple "pull API" for HTML parsing, after Perl's HTML::TokeParser. Many simple HTML parsing tasks are simpler this way than with the HTMLParser module. pullparser.PullParser is a subclass of HTMLParser.HTMLParser.

Examples:

This program extracts all links from a document. It will print one line for each link, containing the URL and the textual description between the <a>...</a> tags:

import pullparser, sys
f = file(sys.argv[1])
p = pullparser.PullParser(f)
for token in p.tags("a"):
    if token.type == "endtag": continue
    url = dict(token.attrs).get("href", "-")
    text = p.get_compressed_text(endat=("endtag", "a"))
    print "%s\t%s" % (url, text)

This program extracts the <title> from the document:

import pullparser, sys
f = file(sys.argv[1])
p = pullparser.PullParser(f)
if p.get_tag("title"):
    title = p.get_compressed_text()
    print "Title: %s" % title

Thanks to Gisle Aas, who wrote HTML::TokeParser.

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All documentation (including this web page) is included in the distribution.

Stable release.

The only reason this appears to be a beta release is that I forgot to remove the 'b' from the version string on the last release...

For installation instructions, see the INSTALL file included in the distribution.

FAQs

Which version of Python do I need?
2.2.1 or above.
Which license?
The BSD license (included in distribution).
Why does it fail to parse my HTML?
Because module HTMLParser is fussy. Try pullparser.TolerantPullParser instead, which uses module sgmllib instead. Note that self-closing tags (<foo/>) will show up as 'starttag' tags, not 'startendtag' tags if you use this class - this is a limitation of module sgmllib.
Why don't I see the tokens I expect?
- Are there missing end-tags in your HTML? (Maybe this will improve in future.)
- Element names passed to methods such as PullParser.get_token() must be given in lower case - maybe you forgot that? (Element names in the HTML can be any case, of course.)
- HTMLParser.HTMLParser isn't very robust. Would be fairly easy to (perhaps optionally) rebase on the other standard library HTML parsing module, sgmllib.SGMLParser (which is really an HTML parser, not a full SGML parser, despite the name). I'm not going to do that, though.

I prefer questions and comments to be sent to the mailing list rather than direct to me.

John J. Lee, July 2005.

pullparser

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See also

FAQs