parsedom 1.0.0

Getting element content.

from parsedom import parseDOM
link_html = "<a href='bla.html'>Link Test</a>"
ret = parseDOM(link_html, "a")
print repr(ret) # Prints ['Link Test']

Getting an element attribute.

link_html = "<a href='bla.html'>Link Test</a>"
ret = parseDOM(link_html, "a", ret = "href")
print repr(ret) # Prints ['bla.html']

Get element with matching attribute.

link_html = "<a href='bla1.html' id='link1'>Link Test1</a><a href='bla2.html' id='link2'>Link Test2</a><a href='bla3.html' id='link3'>Link Test3</a>"
ret1 = parseDOM(link_html, "a", attrs = { "id": "link1" }, ret = "href")
ret2 = parseDOM(link_html, "a", attrs = { "id": "link2" })
ret3 = parseDOM(link_html, "a", attrs = { "id": "link3" }, ret = "id")
print repr(ret1) # Prints ['bla1.html']
print repr(ret2) # Prints ['Link Test2']
print repr(ret3) # Prints ['link3']

When scraping sites it is prudent to scrape in steps, since real websites are often complicated.

Take this example where you want to get all the user uploads.

<div id="content">
 <div id="sidebar">
  <div id="latest">
   <a href="/video?8wxOVn99FTE">Miley Cyrus - When I Look At You</a>&gt;br /&lt;
   <a href="/video?46">Puppet theater</a>&lt;br /&gt;
   <a href="/video?98">VBLOG #42</a>&lt;br /&gt;
   <a href="/video?11">Fourth upload</a>&lt;br /&gt;
  &lt;/div&gt;
 &lt;/div&gt;
 &lt;div id="user"&gt;
  &lt;div id="uploads"&gt;
   <a href="/video?12">First upload</a>&lt;br /&gt;
   <a href="/video?23">Second upload</a>&lt;br /&gt;
   <a href="/video?34">Third upload</a>&lt;br /&gt;
   <a href="/video?41">Fourth upload</a>&lt;br /&gt;
  &lt;/div&gt;
 &lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;

The first step is to limit your search to the correct area.

One should always find the inner most DOM element that contains the needed data.

ret = parseDOM(html, "div", attrs = { "id": "uploads" })

The variable ret now contains

['<a href="/video?12">First upload</a>&lt;br /&gt;
<a href="/video?23">Second upload</a>&lt;br /&gt;
<a href="/video?34">Third upload</a>&lt;br /&gt;
<a href="/video?41">Fourth upload</a>&lt;br /&gt;']

And now we get the video url.

videos = parseDOM(ret, "a", ret = "href")
print repr(videos) # Prints [ "video?12", "video?23", "video?34", "video?41" ]