Is there any Python library that allows me to parse an HTML document similar to what jQuery does?
i.e. I'd like to be able to use CSS selectors syntax to grab an arbitrary set of nodes from the document, read their content/attributes, etc.
The only Python HTML parsing lib I've used before was BeautifulSoup, and even though it's fine I keep thinking it would be faster to do my parsing if I had jQuery syntax available. :D
If you are fluent with BeautifulSoup, you could just add soupselect to your libs.
Soupselect is a CSS selector extension for BeautifulSoup.
Usage:
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup as Soup
from soupselect import select
import urllib
soup = Soup(urllib.urlopen('http://slashdot.org/'))
select(soup, 'div.title h3')
[<h3><span><a href='//science.slashdot.org/'>Science</a>:</span></h3>,
<h3><a href='//slashdot.org/articles/07/02/28/0120220.shtml'>Star Trek</h3>,
..]
Consider PyQuery:
http://packages.python.org/pyquery/
>>> from pyquery import PyQuery as pq
>>> from lxml import etree
>>> import urllib
>>> d = pq("<html></html>")
>>> d = pq(etree.fromstring("<html></html>"))
>>> d = pq(url='http://google.com/')
>>> d = pq(url='http://google.com/', opener=lambda url: urllib.urlopen(url).read())
>>> d = pq(filename=path_to_html_file)
>>> d("#hello")
[<p#hello.hello>]
>>> p = d("#hello")
>>> p.html()
'Hello world !'
>>> p.html("you know <a href='http://python.org/'>Python</a> rocks")
[<p#hello.hello>]
>>> p.html()
u'you know <a href="http://python.org/">Python</a> rocks'
>>> p.text()
'you know Python rocks'
The lxml library supports CSS selectors.
css selectorsimport requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup as Soup
html = requests.get('https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3051295').content
soup = Soup(html)
Title of this question
soup.select('h1.grid--cell :first-child')[0].text
Number of question upvotes
# first item
soup.select_one('[itemprop="upvoteCount"]').text
using Python Requests to get the html page
