Question

I have the following problem:

I would like to parse html files and get links from the html file. I can get links with the following code:

class MyHTMLParser(HTMLParser):
    links=[]
    def __init__(self,url):
        HTMLParser.__init__(self)
        self.url = url

    def handle_starttag(self, tag, attrs):
        try: 
            if tag == 'a':
                for name, value in attrs:
                    if name == 'href':
                        if value[:5]=="http:":
                            self.links.append(value)
        except: 
            pass

But I dont want to get audio files, video files, etc. I only want to get html links. How can I do that?

Answer 1

I can check link ending and if it is particular format I can avoid
appending that link to the list. Is there other way?

You could look at the 'Content-Type' header:

import urllib2
url = 'https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13431060/python-html-parsing'
req = urllib2.Request(url)
req.get_method = lambda : 'HEAD'    
response = urllib2.urlopen(req)
content_type = response.headers.getheader('Content-Type')
print(content_type)

yields

text/html; charset=utf-8

---

Many thanks to @JonClements for req.get_method = lambda : 'HEAD'. More info on this and alternate methods for sending a HEAD request can be found here.