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I have an HTML file (encoded in utf-8). I open it with codecs.open(). The file architecture is:
<html>
// header
<body>
// some text
<table>
// some rows with cells here
// some cells contains tables
</table>
// maybe some text here
<table>
// a form and other stuff
</table>
// probably some more text
</body></html>
I need to retrieve only first table (discard the one with form). Omit all input before first <table> and after corresponding </table>. Some cells contains also paragraphs, bolds and scripts. There is no more than one nested table per row of main table.
How can I extract it to get a list of rows, where each elements holds plain (unicode string) cell's data and a list of rows for each nested table? There's no more than 1 level of nesting.
I tried HTMLParse, PyParse and re module, but can't get this working. I'm quite new to Python.
505
Try beautiful soup
In principle you need to use a real parser (which Beaut. Soup is), regex cannot deal with nested elements, for computer sciencey reasons (finite state machines can't parse context-free grammars, IIRC)
185
You may like lxml. I'm not sure I really understood what you want to do with that structure, but maybe this example will help...
import lxml.html
def process_row(row):
for cell in row.xpath('./td'):
inner_tables = cell.xpath('./table')
if len(inner_tables) < 1:
yield cell.text_content()
else:
yield [process_table(t) for t in inner_tables]
def process_table(table):
return [process_row(row) for row in table.xpath('./tr')]
html = lxml.html.parse('test.html')
first_table = html.xpath('//body/table[1]')[0]
data = process_table(first_table))
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