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jquery-like HTML parsing in Python?

Is there any Python library that allows me to parse an HTML document similar to what jQuery does?

i.e. I'd like to be able to use CSS selector syntax to grab an arbitrary set of nodes from the document, read their content/attributes, etc.

The only Python HTML parsing lib I've used before was BeautifulSoup, and even though it's fine I keep thinking it would be faster to do my parsing if I had jQuery syntax available. :D

Wed, June 16, 2010, 3:12 p.m. / / notes / #jquery #python #questions #stackoverflow #software-development / Syndicated: stackexchange / 💬 3

Last modified at: Oct. 12, 2020, 1:52 a.m. Source file

Comments

Commenter photo
systempuntoout said...

If you are fluent with BeautifulSoup, you could just add soupselect to your libs.
Soupselect is a CSS selector extension for BeautifulSoup.

Usage:

>>> from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup as Soup
>>> from soupselect import select
>>> import urllib
>>> soup = Soup(urllib.urlopen('http://slashdot.org/'))
>>> select(soup, 'div.title h3')
[<h3><span><a href='//science.slashdot.org/'>Science</a>:</span></h3>,
 <h3><a href='//slashdot.org/articles/07/02/28/0120220.shtml'>Star Trek</h3>,
..]
via stackoverflow.com
Commenter photo
Luke Stanley said...

Consider PyQuery:

http://packages.python.org/pyquery/

>>> from pyquery import PyQuery as pq
>>> from lxml import etree
>>> import urllib
>>> d = pq("<html></html>")
>>> d = pq(etree.fromstring("<html></html>"))
>>> d = pq(url='http://google.com/')
>>> d = pq(url='http://google.com/', opener=lambda url: urllib.urlopen(url).read())
>>> d = pq(filename=path_to_html_file)
>>> d("#hello")
[<p#hello.hello>]
>>> p = d("#hello")
>>> p.html()
'Hello world !'
>>> p.html("you know <a href='http://python.org/'>Python</a> rocks")
[<p#hello.hello>]
>>> p.html()
u'you know <a href="http://python.org/">Python</a> rocks'
>>> p.text()
'you know Python rocks'
via stackoverflow.com