html5lib
html5lib is a pure-python library for parsing HTML. It is designed to conform to the WHATWG HTML specification, as is implemented by all major web browsers.
Usage
Simple usage follows this pattern:
import html5lib
with open("mydocument.html", "rb") as f:
document = html5lib.parse(f)
or:
import html5lib
document = html5lib.parse("<p>Hello World!")
By default, the document
will be an xml.etree
element instance. Whenever possible, html5lib chooses the accelerated ElementTree
implementation (i.e. xml.etree.cElementTree
on Python 2.x).
Two other tree types are supported: xml.dom.minidom
and lxml.etree
. To use an alternative format, specify the name of a treebuilder:
import html5lib
with open("mydocument.html", "rb") as f:
lxml_etree_document = html5lib.parse(f, treebuilder="lxml")
When using with urllib2
(Python 2), the charset from HTTP should be pass into html5lib as follows:
from contextlib import closing
from urllib2 import urlopen
import html5lib
with closing(urlopen("http://example.com/")) as f:
document = html5lib.parse(f, transport_encoding=f.info().getparam("charset"))
When using with urllib.request
(Python 3), the charset from HTTP should be pass into html5lib as follows:
from urllib.request import urlopen
import html5lib
with urlopen("http://example.com/") as f:
document = html5lib.parse(f, transport_encoding=f.info().get_content_charset())
To have more control over the parser, create a parser object explicitly. For instance, to make the parser raise exceptions on parse errors, use:
import html5lib
with open("mydocument.html", "rb") as f:
parser = html5lib.HTMLParser(strict=True)
document = parser.parse(f)
When you're instantiating parser objects explicitly, pass a treebuilder class as the tree
keyword argument to use an alternative document format:
import html5lib
parser = html5lib.HTMLParser(tree=html5lib.getTreeBuilder("dom"))
minidom_document = parser.parse("<p>Hello World!")
More documentation is available at https://html5lib.readthedocs.io/.
Installation
html5lib works on CPython 2.7+, CPython 3.5+ and PyPy. To install:
$ pip install html5lib
The goal is to support a (non-strict) superset of the versions that pip supports.
Optional Dependencies
The following third-party libraries may be used for additional functionality:
lxml
is supported as a tree format (for both building and walking) under CPython (but not PyPy where it is known to cause segfaults);genshi
has a treewalker (but not builder); andchardet
can be used as a fallback when character encoding cannot be determined.
Bugs
Please report any bugs on the issue tracker.
Tests
Unit tests require the pytest
and mock
libraries and can be run using the py.test
command in the root directory.
Test data are contained in a separate html5lib-tests repository and included as a submodule, thus for git checkouts they must be initialized:
$ git submodule init $ git submodule update
If you have all compatible Python implementations available on your system, you can run tests on all of them using the tox
utility, which can be found on PyPI.
Questions?
There's a mailing list available for support on Google Groups, html5lib-discuss, though you may get a quicker response asking on IRC in #whatwg on irc.freenode.net.