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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-03T02:42:53+00:00

Okay, the Title is a bit vague, but what I’m trying to do is

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Okay, the Title is a bit vague, but what I’m trying to do is download data online, parse it and then put the parsed ‘data’ into an excel file.

I’m getting stuck in trying to put the data into a vector or list. Note that, the data can be either words or numbers. Also, I the length of the data is unknown. I tried the code below:

class MyHTMLParser(HTMLParser):
    def handle_data(self, data):
        d=[]
        d=d.append(data)

parser = MyHTMLParser()
parser.feed('<html><head><title>Test</title></head>'
            '<body><h1>Parse me!</h1></body></html>')

d

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<pyshell#34>", line 1, in <module>
d
NameError: name 'd' is not defined

I looked around the forum for an answer, but didn’t seem to encounter anything. I am a beginner, so may I’m missing something basic? Thanks, for the help…

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    There are three problems with your code.

    • You are creating a new empty list every time you call the method.
    • list.append returns None (not the list) so your list that now contains one element is not actually stored anywhere.
    • Assigning to a variable inside a function creates a local variable, not a global variable (unless you specify that the variable should be global with the global keyword).

    Try this instead:

    d = []

class MyHTMLParser(HTMLParser):
    def handle_data(self, data):
        d.append(data)

    It’s also a bad style to use global variable. You might want to consider making d an attribute of the class, and giving it a better name.

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