Chapter 23. Structured Text: HTML


Most documents on the Web use HTML, the HyperText Markup Language. Markup is the insertion of special tokens, known as tags, in a text document to give structure to the text. HTML is, in theory, an application of the large, general standard known as SGML, the Standard General Markup Language. In practice, many of the Web's documents use HTML in sloppy or incorrect ways. Browsers have evolved many practical heuristics over the years to try and compensate for this, but even so, it still sometimes happens that a browser displays an incorrect web page in some weird way (don't blame the browser: 9 times out of 10, all the blame and then some is deserved by the web page's author!).

HTML is not suitable for much more than presenting documents on a screen. Complete and precise extraction of the information in the document, working backward from the document's presentation, is often unfeasible. To tighten things up, HTML has evolved into a more rigorous standard called XHTML. XHTML is very similar to traditional HTML, but it is defined in terms of XML and more precisely than HTML. You can handle XHTML with the tools covered in Chapter 24.

Despite the difficulties, it's often possible to extract at least some useful information from HTML documents (a task often known as screen-scraping, or just scraping). Python supplies the sgmllib, htmllib, and HTMLParser modules for the task of parsing HTML documents, whether this parsing is for the purpose of presenting the documents, or, more typically, as part of an attempt to extract (scrape) information. When you're dealing with broken web pages, third-party module BeautifulSoup offers your best, last hope. Generating HTML and embedding Python in HTML are also frequent tasks. No standard Python library module supports HTML generation or embedding directly, but you can use normal Python string manipulation, and third-party modules can also help.




Python in a Nutshell
Python in a Nutshell, Second Edition (In a Nutshell)
ISBN: 0596100469
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 192
Authors: Alex Martelli

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