Question

I have an HTML file and i would like to parse through it using python 3.2
sample :-

<td class="ln">15</td><td class="sf3b2"><code>&nbsp;</code></td>
<td class="ln">15</td><td class="sf3b2"><code>&nbsp;</code></td>

The job is to detect the numbers which are not tagged (in this case 15 only) and store them in another text file. I aint being able to decide which html parser to use (lxml,beautiful soup) as I am new to this. Could you please guide me about how to approach this problem.Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

You could try something like this.

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup

def getPrintUnicode(soup):

    body=''
    if isinstance(soup, unicode):
        soup = soup.replace(''',"'")
        soup = soup.replace('"','"')
        soup = soup.replace(' ',' ')
        soup = soup.replace('>','>')
        soup = soup.replace('&lt;','<')
        body = body + soup
    else:
        if not soup.contents:
            return ''
        con_list = soup.contents
        for con in con_list:
            body = body + getPrintUnicode(con)
    return body

print getPrintUnicode(BeautifulSoup('<td class="ln">15</td><td class="sf3b2"><code>&nbsp;</code></td>'))

You can use this getPrintUnicode() function on the soup of whole page. It will return the complete content. Use exceptions and convert string to integers.
eg.

print int(getPrintUnicode(BeautifulSoup('<td class="ln">15</td><td class="sf3b2"><code>&nbsp;</code></td>')))