Parsing HTML?

I'm trying to parse an HTML file.  I want to retrieve all of the text
inside a certain tag that I find with XPath.  The DOM seems to make
this available with the innerHTML element, but I haven't found a way
to do it in Python.

> I'm trying to parse an HTML file.  I want to retrieve all of the text
> inside a certain tag that I find with XPath.  The DOM seems to make
> this available with the innerHTML element, but I haven't found a way
> to do it in Python.

Have you tried http://www.google.com/search?q=python+html+parser ?

HTH,
Daniel

BeautifulSoup does what I need it to.  Though, I was hoping to find
something that would let me work with the DOM the way JavaScript can
work with web browsers' implementations of the DOM.  Specifically, I'd
like to be able to access the innerHTML element of a DOM element.
Python's built-in HTMLParser is SAX-based, so I don't want to use
that, and the minidom doesn't appear to implement this part of the
DOM.

On Wed, Apr 2, 2008 at 10:37 PM, Daniel Fetchinson
<fetchinson@googlemail.com> wrote: 
>
>  Have you tried http://www.google.com/search?q=python+html+parser ?
>
>  HTH,
>  Daniel
>

On 3 Apr, 06:59, Benjamin <ben...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm trying to parse an HTML file.  I want to retrieve all of the text
> inside a certain tag that I find with XPath.  The DOM seems to make
> this available with the innerHTML element, but I haven't found a way
> to do it in Python.

With libxml2dom you'd do the following:

1. Parse the file using libxml2dom.parse with html set to a true
value.
2. Use the xpath method on the document to select the desired
element.
3. Use the toString method on the element to get the text of the
element (including start and end tags), or the textContent
property
to get the text between the tags.

See the Package Index page for more details:

http://www.python.org/pypi/libxml2dom

Paul