Get the html under a tag using htmlparser python

Question

I want to get whole html under a tag and using HTMLParser. I am able to currently get the data between the tags and following is my code

class LinksParser(HTMLParser):
  def __init__(self):
    HTMLParser.__init__(self)
    self.recording = 0
    self.data = ''

  def handle_starttag(self, tag, attributes):
    if tag != 'span':
      return
    if self.recording:
      self.recording += 1
      return
    for name, value in attributes:
      if name == 'itemprop' and value == 'description':
        break
    else:
      return
    self.recording = 1

  def handle_endtag(self, tag):
    if tag == 'span' and self.recording:
      self.recording -= 1

  def handle_data(self, data):
    if self.recording:
      self.data += data

I also want the html tags inside the input for example

<span itemprop="description">
<h1>My First Heading</h1>
<p>My first <br/><br/>paragraph.</p>
</span>

when provided as input would only give me the data with out tags. Is there any method with which I can get whole html between the tags?

Answer 1

One could use xml.etree.ElementTree.TreeBuilder to exploit etree API for finding/manipulating the <span> element:

import sys
from HTMLParser import HTMLParser
from xml.etree import cElementTree as etree

class LinksParser(HTMLParser):
  def __init__(self):
      HTMLParser.__init__(self)
      self.tb = etree.TreeBuilder()

  def handle_starttag(self, tag, attributes):
      self.tb.start(tag, dict(attributes))

  def handle_endtag(self, tag):
      self.tb.end(tag)

  def handle_data(self, data):
      self.tb.data(data)

  def close(self):
      HTMLParser.close(self)
      return self.tb.close()

parser = LinksParser()
parser.feed(sys.stdin.read())
root = parser.close()
span = root.find(".//span[@itemprop='description']")
etree.ElementTree(span).write(sys.stdout)

Output

<span itemprop="description">
<h1>My First Heading</h1>
<p>My first <br /><br />paragraph.</p>
</span>

To print without the parent (root) <span> tag:

sys.stdout.write(span.text)
for child in span:
    sys.stdout.write(etree.tostring(child)) # add encoding="unicode" on Python 3