html2json

Parsing HTML to JSON

Project description

Convert a HTML webpage to JSON data using a template defined in JSON.

Installation

This package is available on PyPi. Just use pip install -U html2json to install it. Then you can import it using from html2json import collect.

API

The method is collect(html, template). html is the HTML of page loaded as string, and template is the JSON of template loaded as Python objects.

Note that the HTML must contain the root node, like <html>...</html> or <div>...</div>.

Template Syntax

The basic syntax is keyName: [selector, attr, [listOfRegexes]].
1. selector is a CSS selector (supported by lxml).
  - When the selector is null, the root node itself is matched.
  - When the selector cannot be matched, null is returned.
2. attr matches the attribute value. It can be null to match either the inner text or the outer text when the inner text is empty.
3. The list of regexes [listOfRegexes] supports two forms of regex operations. The operations with in the list are executed sequentially.
  - Replacement: s/regex/replacement/g. g is optional for multiple replacements.
  - Extraction: /regex/.

For example:

{
    "Color": ["head link:nth-of-type(1)", "href", ["/\\w+(?=\\.css)/"]],
}

As JSON, nested structure can be easily constructed.

{
    "Cover": {
        "URL": [".cover img", "src", []],
        "Number of Favorites": [".cover .favorites", "value", []]
    },
}

An alternative simplified syntax keyName: [subRoot, subTemplate] can be used.
1. subRoot a CSS selector of the new root for each sub entry.
2. subTemplate is a sub-template for each entry, recursively.

For example, the previous example can be simplified as follow.

{
    "Cover": [".cover", {
        "URL": ["img", "src", []],
        "Number of Favorites": [".favorites", "value", []]
    }],
}

To extract a list of sub-entries following the same sub-template, the list syntax is keyName: [[subRoot, subTemplate]]. Please note the difference (surrounding [ and ]) from the previous syntax above.
1. subRoot is the CSS selector of the new root for each sub entry.
2. subTemplate is the sub-template for each entry, recursively.

For example:

{
    "Comments": [[".comments", {
        "From": [".from", null, []],
        "Content": [".content", null, []],
        "Photos": [["img", {
            "URL": ["", "src", []]
        }]]
    }]]
}