I am trying to rip some text out of a large number of html documents (numbers in the hundreds of thousands). The documents are really forms but they are prepared by a very large group of different organizations so there is significant variation in how they create the document. For example, the documents are divided into chapters. I might want to extract the contents of Chapter 5 from every document so I can analyze the content of the chapter. Initially I thought this would be easy but it turns out that the authors might use a set of non-nested tables throughout the document to hold the content so that Chapter n could be displayed using td tags inside a table. Or they might use other elements such as p tags H tags, div tags or any other block level element.

After trying repeatedly to use lxml to help me identify the beginning and end of each chapter I have determined that it is a lot cleaner to use a regular expression because in every case, no matter what the enclosing html element is the chapter label is always in the form of

>Chapter #

It is a little more complicated in that there might be some white space or non-breaking space represented in different ways (  or   or just spaces). Nonetheless it was trivial to write a regular expression to identify the beginning of each section. (The beginning of one section is the end of the previous section.)

But now I want to use lxml to get the text out. My thought is that I have really no choice but to walk along my string to find the close tag for the element that encloses the text I am using to find the relevant section.

That is here is one example where the element holding the Chapter name is a div

<div style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN-LEFT: 0pt; TEXT-INDENT: 0pt; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0pt" align="left"><font style="DISPLAY: inline; FONT-WEIGHT: bold; FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Times New Roman">Chapter 1.&#160;&#160;&#160;Our Beginnings.</font></div>

So I am imagining that I would begin at the location where I found the match for chapter 1 and set up a regular expressions to find the next

</div|</td|</p|</h1 . . .

So at this point I have identified the type of element holding my chapter heading

I can use the same logic to find all of the text that is within that element that is set up a regular expression to help me mark from

>Chapter 1.&#160;&#160;&#160;Our Beginnings.<

So I have identified where my Chapter 1 begins

I can do the same for chapter 2 (which is where Chapter 1 ends)

Now I am imagining that I am going to snip the document beginning at the opening of the element that I identified as the element the indicates where chapter 1 begins and ending just before the opening of the element that I identified as the element that indicates where Chapter 2 begins. The string that I have identified will then be fed to lxml to use its power to get the content.

I am going to all of this trouble because I have read over and over - never use a regular expression to extract content from html documents and I have not hit on a way to be as accurate with lxml to identify the starting and ending locations for the text I want to extract. For example, I can never be certain that the subtitle of Chapter 1 is Our Beginnings it could be Our Red Canary. Let me say that I spent two solid days trying with lxml to be confident that I had the beginning and ending elements and I could only be accurate <60% of the time but a very short regular expression has given me better than 95% success.

I have a tendency to make things more complicated than necessary so I am wondering if anyone has seen or solved a similar problems and if they had an approach (not the details mind you) that they would like to offer.