Parse html and find data in the html
- by Dan.StackOverflow
Hi all. I am trying to use html5lib to parse an html page in to something I can query with xpath. html5lib has close to zero documentation and I've spent too much time trying to figure this problem out. Ultimate goal is to pull out the second row of a table:
<html>
<table>
<tr><td>Header</td></tr>
<tr><td>Want This</td></tr>
</table>
</html>
so lets try it:
>>> doc = html5lib.parse('<html><table><tr><td>Header</td></tr><tr><td>Want This</td> </tr></table></html>', treebuilder='lxml')
>>> doc
<lxml.etree._ElementTree object at 0x1a1c290>
that looks good, lets see what else we have:
>>> root = doc.getroot()
>>> print(lxml.etree.tostring(root))
<html:html xmlns:html="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><html:head/><html:body><html:table><html:tbody><html:tr><html:td>Header</html:td></html:tr><html:tr><html:td>Want This</html:td></html:tr></html:tbody></html:table></html:body></html:html>
LOL WUT?
seriously. I was planning on using some xpath to get at the data I want, but that doesn't seem to work. So what can I do? I am willing to try different libraries and approaches.