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Practice

What is HTML Parsing?

HTML Parsing is the process of reading data from an HTML document, analyzing its structure, and making it usable within a program.

By parsing HTML, you can extract and manipulate specific elements from a webpage.


Parsing an HTML Document​

  1. Creating a BeautifulSoup Object

    • Create a BeautifulSoup object with the HTML document you want to parse.
    • This object allows you to access and manipulate HTML elements.
    Creating a BeautifulSoup Object
    from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

    html_doc = "<html><head><title>Hello World</title></head><body>...</body></html>"
    soup = BeautifulSoup(html_doc, 'html.parser')

  2. Understanding Document Structure

    • An HTML document is composed of a hierarchical structure of tags.

    • Various tags like <html>, <head>, <body>, <div>, <span>, <p> are used.


Methods for Extracting Key Elements​

  1. Finding Specific Tags

    • Use the find() and find_all() methods to search for specific tags.

    • find() returns the first matching tag, while find_all() returns a list of all matching tags.

    Finding Specific Tags
    # Finding the first <p> tag
    first_p = soup.find('p')

    # Finding all <a> tags
    all_links = soup.find_all('a')

  1. Extracting Tag Content

    • Use the .text attribute of a tag object to extract the text content.
    Extracting Tag Content
    # Text content of the first <p> tag
    text = first_p.text

  1. Accessing Tag Attributes

    • Access tag attributes by treating the tag object like a dictionary.

    • For example, to get the value of the href attribute from an <a href="url"> tag.

    Accessing Tag Attributes
    # Value of the href attribute from the first <a> tag
    href_value = all_links[0]['href']

Practice​

Click the Run Code button on the right and try modifying the code or checking the crawling results!

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