Parsing a html file

Using the select-one method to find the second element from the li tag. Using the prettify method to modify the code. Printing html code of some tags. Using the recursiveChildGenerator method to traverse the html file.

Traversing the names of the tags. Printing the names of the tags. Printing the Code, name, and text of a tag. Using the Children attribute to get the children of a tag. Only contain tag names and not the spaces.

Using the descendants attribute. Printing the name, and text of p tag. Prints the second element from the li tag. Attention geek! Strengthen your foundations with the Python Programming Foundation Course and learn the basics. Previous How does Query. Sometimes, especially for less dynamic web pages, we just want the text from it.

Let's see how we can get it! Let's get all the text of the HTML document:. Now that we have mastered the components of Beautiful Soup, it's time to put our learning to use.

The site contains random data about books and is a great space to test out your web scraping techniques. First, create a new file called scraper. Let's import all the libraries we need for this script:.

You would have bs4 already installed, and time , csv , and re are built-in packages in Python. You'll need to install the requests module directly like this:. Before you begin, you need to understand how the webpage's HTML is structured. Then right-click on the components of the webpage to be scraped, and click on the inspect button to understand the hierarchy of the tags as shown below. This will show you the underlying HTML for what you're inspecting. The following picture illustrates these steps:.

Let's write a function that scrapes a book item and extract its data:. The last line of the above snippet points to a function to write the list of scraped strings to a CSV file. Let's add that function now:. As we have a function that can scrape a page and export to CSV, we want another function that crawls through the paginated website, collecting book data on each page.

The only varying element in the URL is the page number. This string formatted URL with the page number can be fetched using the method requests. We can then create a new BeautifulSoup object.

I guess that when people talk about HTML parsing, they really mean HTML deserialization - the process of taking a character stream and turning it into a object model, as described by Spudley. As Anshuman Dwibhashi points out parsing actually means something more specific, but in my experience, is not what is usually meant in the context of the term "HTML parsing". Btw, both the parsing and html-parsing tags that you've added to the question have tag wiki info that would have given you the answer you were looking for.

Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Parsers: A computer program that parses content is called a parser. There are in general 2 kinds of parsers: Top-down parsing - Top-down parsing can be viewed as an attempt to find left-most derivations of an input-stream by searching for parse trees using a top-down expansion of the given formal grammar rules. Encountered an end tag : h1 Encountered an end tag : body Encountered an end tag : html References Wikipedia Python docs.

Improve this answer. Anshu Dwibhashi Anshu Dwibhashi 4, 2 2 gold badges 24 24 silver badges 58 58 bronze badges. Spudley Spudley k 39 39 gold badges silver badges bronze badges. And which do you reference, please? The Overflow Blog. Podcast Making Agile work for data science. Stack Gives Back Featured on Meta.