I am currently trying to make a program that given a word will look up its definition and return it. Although I have gotten this to work, I had to resort to using RegEx to search for the text between the tags where the definitions are stored. What is a more efficient way to do this using python 3.x?
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Try searching first. stackoverflow.com/search?q=%5Bpython%5D+html+parse all of these questions are applicable to your problem.S.Lott– S.Lott2011-02-04 11:13:00 +00:00Commented Feb 4, 2011 at 11:13
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possible duplicate of How to get the content of a Html page in PythonS.Lott– S.Lott2011-02-04 11:14:22 +00:00Commented Feb 4, 2011 at 11:14
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3 Answers
lxml works for Python 3. It has an ElementTree compatible API, but is using c libraries behind the scenes, so it's fast, and it supports Xpaths, which is a nice way of parsing (sometimes).
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Try BeautifulSoup a good HTML parser for Python. (works with Python 3.x too, although unless you are deep into a Python 3.0 project, consider using 2.7)
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Daren Thomas
yep, BeautifulSoup is the secret sauce!
Your's a pretty simple requirement when it comes to HTML parsing. Python standard library includes ElementTree module which should be helpful to do the task which you are planning to undertake. Look for the example snippet which is given in that page.
Also, never make the mistake of parsing HTML/XML using regex. You may not know when it will get insanely complicated and it is a bad idea under any situation too.
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