Question

I have this html data which I need to parse to extract data from it.But it has so many tags and data is also difficult too navigable for me.From below Html data i need to create a python dictionary list that will look like:

[{“School”:”Childs
play”},{“Place”:”newyork”},{“Level”:”four”},{“Country”:”USA”},{“Level
Of Course”:”Easy”}]

<div class="quick">
 <strong>School</strong><br /> Childs play <br /><br />
 <strong>Place</strong><br />
 <a href="Search.aspx?Menu=new&amp;Me=">newyork</a><br /><br />
 <strong>Level</strong><br />four<br /><br />
 <strong>Country</strong><br />USA<br /><br />
 <strong>Level Of Course</strong><br />Easy<br /><br />
</div>

I tried using beautifulsoup but didnt get success .Please help

Answer 1

Unfortunately, the HTML is not ideally constructed for parsing, but it is possible to extract the data into a meaningful Python dictionary.

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
soup = BeautifulSoup(htmlString)

raw_data = soup.find(**{"class": "quick"}).contents
data = [x for x in raw_data if not hasattr(x, "name") or not x.name == "br"]

Using if not hasattr(x, "name") or not x.name == "br" first checks to make sure that the item is an instance of NavigableString and then checks that the element is not a <BR> tag.

data will then be of the format [<KEY>, <VALUE>, <KEY>, <VALUE>] from which it should be fairly trivial to extract the data.