Question :
What’s my best bet for parsing HTML if I can’t use BeautifulSoup or lxml? I’ve got some code that uses SGMLlib but it’s a bit low-level and it’s now deprecated.
I would prefer if it could stomache a bit of malformed HTML although I’m pretty sure most of the input will be pretty clean.
Answer #1:
Python has a native HTML parser, however the Tidy wrapper Nick suggested would probably be a solid choice as well. Tidy is a very common library, (written in C is it?)
Answer #2:
Perhaps µTidylib will meet your needs?
Answer #3:
You can install lxml and many other python modules easily and seamlessly on the Mac (OS X) using Pallet, which is the MacPorts official GUI
The module name is py27-lxml. Easy as 1,2,3.
Answer #4:
http://www.xmlhack.com/read.php?item=1392
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pirxx/
http://pyxml.sourceforge.net/topics/
I don’t have much experience with python, but I have used Xerces (from the Apache foundation) in the past and found it to be very useful. The learning curve isn’t bad either, though I’m not coming from a python perspective. I suggest you consider it though. (The first two links I’ve included discuss python interfaces to Xerces and the last one is the first google hit on “python xml”).
Answer #6:
html5lib is good:
http://code.google.com/p/html5lib/
Update: The link above is broken. A third-party mirror of above, can be accessed from https://github.com/html5lib/gcode-import
