Clean up ugly WYSIWYG HTML code? Python or *nix utility - python

I'm finally upgrading (rewriting ;) ) my first Django app, but I am migrating all the content.
I foolishly gave users a full WYSIWYG editor for certain tasks, the HTML code produced is of course terribly ugly with more extra tags than content.
Does anyone know of a library or external shell app I could use to clean up the code?
I use tidy sometimes, but as far as I know that doesn't do what I'm asking. I want to simplify all the extra span and other garbage tags. I cleaned the most offensive offending styles with some regex, but I it would take a really long time to do anything more using just regex.
Any ideas?

You could also take a look at Bleach a white-list based HTML sanitizer. It uses html5lib to do what Kyle posted, but you'll get a lot more control over which elements and attributes are allowed in the final output.

Beautiful Soup will probably get you a more complete solution, but you might be able to get some cleanup done more simply with html5lib (if you're OK with html5 rules):
import html5lib
from html5lib import sanitizer, treebuilders, treewalkers, serializer
my_html = "<i>Some html fragment</I>" #intentional 'I'
html_parser = html5lib.HTMLParser(tree=treebuilders.getTreeBuilder("dom"))
dom_tree = html_parser.parseFragment(my_html)
walker = treewalkers.getTreeWalker("dom")
stream = walker(dom_tree)
s = serializer.htmlserializer.HTMLSerializer(omit_optional_tags=False, quote_attr_values=True)
cleaned_html = s.render(stream)
cleaned_html == '<i>Some html fragment</i>"
You can also sanitize the html by initializing your html_parser like this:
html_parser = html5lib.HTMLParser(tree=treebuilders.getTreeBuilder("dom"), tokenizer=sanitizer.HTMLSanitizer)

The standard answer is Beautiful Soup.
"Extra span" and "garbage tags" is something you'll need to define very, very carefully so you can remove the tags without removing content.
I would suggest you do two things.
Fix your app so that users don't provide HTML under any circumstances. Django can use RST markup which is much more user-friendly. http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.3/ref/templates/builtins/#django-contrib-markup
Write a Beautiful Soup parser and transform the user's content into RST markup. Keep the structural elements (headings, lists, etc.) and lose the formatting to the extent possible.

Related

Python: Keyword to Links

I am building a blog on Google App Engine. I would like to convert some keywords in my blog posts to links, just like what you see in many WordPress blogs.
Here is one WP plugin which do the same thing:http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/blog-mechanics-keyword-link-plugin-v01/
A plugin that allows you to define keyword/link pairs. The keywords are automatically linked in each of your posts.
I think this is more than a simple Python Replace. What I am dealing with is HTML code. It can be quite complex sometimes.
Take the following code snippet as an example. I want to conver the word example into a link to http://example.com:
Here is an example link:example.com
By a simple Python replace function which replaces example with example, it would output:
Here is an example link:example.com">example.com</a>
but I want:
Here is an example link:example.com
Is there any Python plugin that capable of this? Thanks a lot!
This is roughly what you could do using Beautifulsoup:
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
html_body ="""
Here is an example link:<a href='http://example.com'>example.com</a>
"""
soup = BeautifulSoup(html_body)
for link_tag in soup.findAll('a'):
link_tag.string = "%s%s%s" % ('|',link_tag.string,'|')
for text in soup.findAll(text=True):
text_formatted = ['example'\
if word == 'example' and not (word.startswith('|') and word.endswith('|'))\
else word for word in foo.split() ]
text.replaceWith(' '.join(text_formatted))
for link_tag in soup.findAll('a'):
link_tag.string = link_tag.string[1:-1]
print soup
Basically I'm stripping out all the text from the post_body, replacing the example word with the given link, without touching the links text that are saved by the '|' characters during the parsing.
This is not 100% perfect, for example it does not work if the word you are trying to replace ends with a period; with some patience you could fix all the edge cases.
This would probably be better suited to client-side code. You could easily modify a word highlighter to get the desired results. By keeping this client-side, you can avoid having to expire page caches when your 'tags' change.
If you really need it to be processed server-side, then you need to look at using re.sub which lets you pass in a function, but unless you are operating on plain-text you will have to first parse the HTML using something like minidom to ensure you are not replacing something in the middle of any elements.

Speedier/less resource-demolishing way to strip html from large files than BeautifulSoup? Or, a better way to use BeautifulSoup?

Currently I am having trouble typing this because, according to top, my processor is at 100% and my memory is at 85.7%, all being taken up by python.
Why? Because I had it go through a 250-meg file to remove markup. 250 megs, that's it! I've been manipulating these files in python with so many other modules and things; BeautifulSoup is the first code to give me any problems with something so small. How are nearly 4 gigs of RAM used to manipulate 250megs of html?
The one-liner that I found (on stackoverflow) and have been using was this:
''.join(BeautifulSoup(corpus).findAll(text=True))
Additionally, this seems to remove everything BUT markup, which is sort of the opposite of what I want to do. I'm sure that BeautifulSoup can do that, too, but the speed issue remains.
Is there anything that will do something similar (remove markup, leave text reliably) and NOT require a Cray to run?
lxml.html is FAR more efficient.
http://lxml.de/lxmlhtml.html
http://blog.ianbicking.org/2008/03/30/python-html-parser-performance/
Looks like this will do what you want.
import lxml.html
t = lxml.html.fromstring("...")
t.text_content()
A couple of other similar questions: python [lxml] - cleaning out html tags
lxml.etree, element.text doesn't return the entire text from an element
Filter out HTML tags and resolve entities in python
UPDATE:
You probably want to clean the HTML to remove all scripts and CSS, and then extract the text using .text_content()
from lxml import html
from lxml.html.clean import clean_html
tree = html.parse('http://www.example.com')
tree = clean_html(tree)
text = tree.getroot().text_content()
(From: Remove all html in python?)
use cleaner from lxml.html:
>>> import lxml.html
>>> from lxml.html.clean import Cleaner
>>> cleaner = Cleaner(style=True) # to delete scripts styles objects comments etc;)
>>> html = lxml.html.fromstring(content).xpath('//body')[0]
>>> print cleaner.clean_html(html)

Python: Separating an HTML snippets to paragraphs

I have a snippet of HTML that contains paragraphs. (I mean p tags.) I want to split the string into the different paragraphs. For instance:
'''
<p class="my_class">Hello!</p>
<p>What's up?</p>
<p style="whatever: whatever;">Goodbye!</p>
'''
Should become:
['<p class="my_class">Hello!</p>',
'<p>What's up?</p>'
'<p style="whatever: whatever;">Goodbye!</p>']
What would be a good way to approach this?
If your string only contains paragraphs, you may be able to get away with a nicely crafted regex and re.split(). However, if your string is more complex HTML, or not always valid HTML, you might want to look at the BeautifulSoup package.
Usage goes like:
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
soup = BeautifulSoup(some_html)
paragraphs = list(unicode(x) for x in soup.findAll('p'))
Use lxml.html to parse the HTML into the form you want. This is essentially the same advice as the people who are recommending BeautifulSoup, except lxml is still being actively developed and BeatifulSoup development has slowed.
Use BeautifulSoup to parse the HTML and iterate over the paragraphs.
The xml.etree (std lib) or lxml.etree (enhanced) make this easy to do, but I'm not going to get the answer cred for this because I don't remember the exact syntax. I keep mixing it up with similar packages and have to look it up afresh every time.

How to get the content of a Html page in Python

I have downloaded the web page into an html file. I am wondering what's the simplest way to get the content of that page. By content, I mean I need the strings that a browser would display.
To be clear:
Input:
<html><head><title>Page title</title></head>
<body><p id="firstpara" align="center">This is paragraph <b>one</b>.
<p id="secondpara" align="blah">This is paragraph <b>two</b>.
</html>
Output:
Page title This is paragraph one. This is paragraph two.
putting together:
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
import re
def removeHtmlTags(page):
p = re.compile(r'''<(?:"[^"]*"['"]*|'[^']*'['"]*|[^'">])+>''')
return p.sub('', page)
def removeHtmlTags2(page):
soup = BeautifulSoup(page)
return ''.join(soup.findAll(text=True))
Related
Python HTML removal
Extracting text from HTML file using Python
What is a light python library that can eliminate HTML tags? (and only text)
Remove HTML tags in AppEngine Python Env (equivalent to Ruby’s Sanitize)
RegEx match open tags except XHTML self-contained tags (famous don't use regex to parse html rant)
Parse the HTML with Beautiful Soup.
To get all the text, without the tags, try:
''.join(soup.findAll(text=True))
Personally, I use lxml because it's a swiss-army knife...
from lxml import html
print html.parse('http://someurl.at.domain').xpath('//body')[0].text_content()
This tells lxml to retrieve the page, locate the <body> tag then extract and print all the text.
I do a lot of page parsing and a regex is the wrong solution most of the time, unless it's a one-time-only need. If the author of the page changes their HTML you run a good risk of your regex breaking. A parser is a lot more likely to continue working.
The big problem with a parser is learning how to access the sections of the document you are after, but there are a lot of XPATH tools you can use inside your browser that simplify the task.
You want to look at Extracting data from HTML documents - Dive into Python because HERE it does (almost)exactly what you want.
The best modules for this task are lxml or html5lib; Beautifull Soap is imho not worth to use anymore. And for recursive models regular expressions are definitly the wrong method.
If I am getting your question correctly, this can simply be done by using urlopen function of urllib. Just have a look at this function to open an url and read the response which will be the html code of that page.
The quickest way to get a usable sample of what a browser would display is to remove any tags from the html and print the rest. This can, for example, be done using python's re.

Preventing BeautifulSoup from converting my XML tags to lowercase

I am using BeautifulStoneSoup to parse an XML document and change some attributes. I noticed that it automatically converts all XML tags to lowercase. For example, my source file has <DocData> elements, which BeautifulSoup converts to <docdata>.
This appears to be causing problems since the program I am feeding my modified XML document to does not seem to accept the lowercase versions. Is there a way to prevent this behavior in BeautifulSoup?
No, that's not a built-in option. The source is pretty straightforward, though. It looks like you want to change the value of encodedName in Tag.__str__.
Simple Answer
change (default html.parser) to xml parser
code: soup = BeautifulSoup(yourXmlStr, 'xml')
Detailed Explanation
refer my answer in another post

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