This is a simple wrapper around lxml which adds some nice features to make working with lxml better. This library covers all my needs in HTML parsing.
lxml obviously :3
- Nice jquery-like CSS selectors
- Simple access to element attributes
- Easy way to convert HTML to other formats (bbcode, markdown, etc.)
- A few nice functions for working with text
- And, of course, all original features of lxml
The main function of the module (for my purposes) is leaf.parse. This
function takes an HTML string as argument, and returns a leaf.Parser
object, which wraps an lxml object.
With this object you can do anything you want, for example:
document = leaf.parse(sample)
# get the links from the DIV with id 'menu' using CSS selectors
links = document('div#menu a')
Or you can do this:
# get first link or return None
link = document.get('div#menu a')
And you can get attributes from these results like this:
print link.onclick
You can also use standard lxml methods like object.xpath, and they
return results as leaf.Parser objects.
My favorite feature is parsing HTML into bbcode (markdown, etc.):
# Let's define simple formatter, which passes text
# and wraps links into [url][/url] (like bbcode)
def code_formatter(element, children):
# Replace <br> tag with line break
if element.tag == 'br':
return '\n'
# Wrap links into [url][/url]
if element.tag == 'a':
return u"[url=link}]{text}[/url]".format(link=element.href, text=children)
# Return children only for other elements.
if children:
return children
This function will be recursively called with element and children (this is string with children parsing result).
So, let's call this parser on some leaf.Parser object:
document.parse(code_formatter)More detailed examples available in the tests.
Finally, this library has some nice functions for working with text:
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| to_unicode | Convert string to unicode string |
| strip_accents | Strip accents from a string |
| strip_symbols | Strip ugly unicode symbols from a string |
| strip_spaces | Strip excess spaces from a string |
| strip_linebreaks | Strip excess line breaks from a string |