How to parse HTML using Python HTMLParser

A sample code snippet on how to use the Python module HTMLParser to extract a well-formed HTML document for multiple

<input name="fileIDs" value="123456" />

Code snippet:

import urllib, urllib2

from HTMLParser import HTMLParser

class MyHTMLParser(HTMLParser):

    def __init__(self, fh):

        """

        {fh} must be an input stream returned by open() or urllib2.urlopen()

        """

        HTMLParser.__init__(self)

        self.fileids = []

        self.feed(fh.read())

    def handle_starttag(self, tag, attrs):

        if tag == 'input':

            attrD = dict(attrs)

            if attrD['name'] == 'fileIDs':

                self.fileids.append(attrD['value'])

    def get_fileids(self):

        return self.fileids

opener = urllib2.build_opener(urllib2.HTTPHandler(debuglevel=1))

opener.addheaders = [('User-agent', 'Mozilla/5.0')]

response = opener.open("http://www.example.com/200.html")

myparser = MyHTMLParser(response)

Reference:

• http://www.hellboundhackers.org/articles/841-using-python-39;s-htmlparser-class.html

Advertisement