BeautifulSoup

Beautiful Soup is a Python library for manipulating HTML pages.

• official website
• documentation

Code Examples

A function to replace the contents of a tag:

import BeautifulSoup
soup = BeautifulSoup.BeautifulSoup("<ul><li>one</li><li>two</li></ul>")

def setcontents (tag, val):
	# remove previous contents
	for c in tag.contents:
		c.extract()
	# insert the new
	tag.insert(0, val)

items = soup.findAll("li")
for item in items:
	setcontents(item, "foo")

print soup.prettify()

A function to wrap one tag inside of another one.

import BeautifulSoup

def wraptag (tag, wrapper):
	# wraps tag with wrapper
	tagIndex = tag.parent.contents.index(tag)
	tag.parent.insert(tagIndex, wrapper)
	wrapper.insert(0, tag)

soup = BeautifulSoup.BeautifulSoup("<ul><li>one</li><li>two</li></ul>")
items = soup.findAll("li")
for item in items:	
	div = BeautifulSoup.Tag(soup, "div")
	wraptag(item, div)

print soup.prettify()

Code Questions

• absolutize function needs ability to patch url's in stylesheets.