I'd like to extract the text from an HTML file using Python. I want essentially the same output I would get if I copied the text from a browser and pasted it into notepad.
I'd like something more robust than using regular expressions that may fail on poorly formed HTML. I've seen many people recommend Beautiful Soup, but I've had a few problems using it. For one, it picked up unwanted text, such as JavaScript source. Also, it did not interpret HTML entities. For example, I would expect ' in HTML source to be converted to an apostrophe in text, just as if I'd pasted the browser content into notepad.
Update: html2text looks promising. It handles HTML entities correctly and ignores JavaScript. However, it does not exactly produce plain text; it produces markdown that would then have to be turned into plain text. It comes with no examples or documentation, but the code looks clean.
you would need to use urllib2 python library to get the html from the website and then parse through the html to grab the text that you want.
Use BeautifulSoup to parse through the html
import BeautifulSoup
resp = urllib2.urlopen("http://stackoverflow.com")
rawhtml = resp.read()
#parse through html to get text
soup=BeautifulSoup(rawhtml)
I don't "copy-paste from browser" is a well-defined operation. For instance, what would happen if the entire page were covered with a transparent floating div? What if it had tables? What about dynamic content?
BeautifulSoup is a powerful parser; you just need to know how to use it (it is easy, for instance, to remove the script tags from the page). Fortunately, it has a lot of documentation.
You can use xml.sax.utils.unescape to unescape HTML entities.
Related
I have searched and get a little bit introduced to some of the web crawling libraries in python like scrapy, beautifulsoup etc. Using these libraries I want to crawl all of the text under a specific heading in a document. If any of you can help me his/her help would be highly appreciated. I have seen some tutorial that how one can get links under a specific class name (by view source page option) using beautiful soap but how can I get a simple text not links under the specific class of heading. Sorry for my bad English
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
r=requests.get('https://patents.google.com/patent/US6886010B2/en')
print(r.content)
soup=BeautifulSoup(r.content)
for link in soup.find_all("div", class_="claims"):
print(link)
Here i have extracted claims text but it also shows other div written in these claims that is div in div i just want to extract the text of the claims only.
By links, I assume you mean the entire contents of the div elements. If you'd like to just print the text contained within them, use the .text attribute or .get_text() method. The entire text of the claims is wrapped inside a unique section element. So you might want to try this:
print(soup.find('section', attrs={'id': 'claims'}).text)
The get_text method gives you a bit more flexibility such as joining bits of text together with a separator and stripping the text of extra newlines.
Also, take a look at the BeautifulSoup Documentation and spend some time reading it.
I want to extract a few text out of a webpage. I searched StackOverFlow (as well as other sites) to find a proper method. I used HTML2TEXT, BEAUTIFULSOUP, NLTK and some other manual methods to do extraction and I failed for example:
HTML2TEXT works on offline (=saved pages) and I need to do it online.
BS4 won't work properly on Unicode (My page is in UTF8 Persian encoding) and it won't extract the text. It also returns HTML tags\codes. I only need rendered text.
NLTK won't work on my Persian text.
Even while trying to open my page with urllib.request.urlopen I encounter some errors.
So as you see I'm so much stuck after trying several methods.
Here's my target URL: http://vynylyn.yolasite.com/page2.php
I want to extract only Persian paragraphs without tags\codes.
(Note: I use Eclipse Kepler w\ Python 34 also I want to extract text then I want to do POS Tagging, Word\Sentence Tokenizing, etc on the text.)
What are my options to get this working?
I'd go for your second option at first. BeautifulSoup 4 should (and does) definitely support unicode (note it's UTF-8, a global character encoding, so there's nothing Persian about it).
And yes, you will get tags, as it's an HTML page. Try searching for a unique ID, or look at the HTML structure on the page(s). For your example, look for element main and then content elements below that, or maybe use div#I1_sys_txt in that specific page. Once you have your element, you just need to call get_text().
Try this (now in Python 3):
#!/usr/bin/env python3
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
content = requests.get('http://vynylyn.yolasite.com/page2.php')
soup = BeautifulSoup(content.text)
tag = soup.find('div', id='I1_sys_txt')
print(tag.get_text() if tag else "<none found>")
I want to parse html code in python and tried beautiful soup and pyquery already. The problem is that those parsers modify original code e.g insert some tag or etc. Is there any parser out there that do not change the code?
I tried HTMLParser but no success! :(
It doesn't modify the code and just tells me where tags are placed. But it fails in parsing web pages like mail.live.com
Any idea how to parse a web page just like a browser?
You can use BeautifulSoup to extract just text and not modify the tags. Its in their documentation.
Same question here:
How to extract text from beautiful soup
No, to this moment there is no such HTML parser and every parser has it's own limitations.
Have you tried the webkit engine with Python bindings?
See this: https://github.com/niwibe/phantompy
You can traverse the real DOM of the parsed web page and do what you need to do.
Background:-
Am using a JS editor on my site. Now when I copy paste external text content on it, there are a few invalid/incomplete html tags that get pasted. ( But it is not made visible on the editor)
Problem:-
Now when this data is posted, the alignment of the entire page gets screwed. How can I detect and change incomplete html tags if any. Should I use a html parser for this purpose ?
As you can see the edit and delete buttons have come out of the div. (The description or data has been copy pasted)
You could try the fantastic Beautiful Soup library for all your parsing needs. Buy now!
I want to get "Main content" instead of < tag> Main content , where the latter is html code and could be retrieved using urllib.urlopen(url).
Just as you open the url in browser, select all text and then copy&paste.
Is there a possible way for this with Python?
Thanks.
Have a look at Beautiful Soup.
Beautiful Soup is a Python HTML/XML parser designed for quick turnaround projects like screen-scraping. Three features make it powerful:
Beautiful Soup won't choke if you give it bad markup. It yields a parse tree that makes approximately as much sense as your original document. This is usually good enough to collect the data you need and run away.
Beautiful Soup provides a few simple methods and Pythonic idioms for navigating, searching, and modifying a parse tree: a toolkit for dissecting a document and extracting what you need. You don't have to create a custom parser for each application.
Beautiful Soup automatically converts incoming documents to Unicode and outgoing documents to UTF-8. You don't have to think about encodings, unless the document doesn't specify an encoding and Beautiful Soup can't autodetect one. Then you just have to specify the original encoding.