HTML Cleaning and Entity Conversion | Python Last Updated : 02 Aug, 2019 Comments Improve Suggest changes Like Article Like Report The very important and always ignored task on web is the cleaning of text. Whenever one thinks to parse HTML, embedded Javascript and CSS is always avoided. The users are only interested in tags and text present on the webserver. lxml installation - It is a Python binding for C libraries - libxslt and libxml2. So maintaining a Python base, it is very fast HTML parsing and XML library. To let it work - C libraries also need to be installed. The link - http://lxml.de/installation.html will provide all the installation instructions. sudo apt-get install python-lxml or pip install lxml Cleaning task is performed using clean_html() function present in the lxml.html.clean module. This function removes the unnecessary HTML tags. In the code below, clean_html() function in the lxml.html.clean module is used to remove unnecessary HTML tags and embedded JavaScript from an HTML string. Code - Cleaning of the text Python3 1== import lxml.html.clean lxml.html.clean.clean_html('<html><head></head> <bodyonload = loadfunc()>my text</body></html>') Output : '<div><body>my text</body></div>' As you can see that the results are much easier and cleaner. Thus, makes our job easy to deal with the HTML. The lxml.html.clean_html() function iterates over the string as it parses the HTML string into a tree. It then removes all nodes that don't hold much importance. Using embedded JavaScript, the function also cleans nodes of unnecessary attributes like embedded JavaScript using regex (regular expression) substitution and matching. This function defines a default Cleaner class that's used clean_html() method is called. By creating self instance, the class behavior can be customized. Converting HTML Entities - Strings such as "&" or "<" are HTML entities. These are normal ASCII character encoding having special uses in HTML. "<" is the entity for "<" because "<" is present within HTML tags and it is the beginning character for an HTML tag. So, to escape it "<" entity is defined. "&" is entity code for "&". To process the text within an HTML document, convert these entities back to their normal characters so as to recognize them and use them appropriately. Requirement : 1) install BeautifulSoup 2) sudo easy_install beautifulsoup4 or sudo pip install beautifulsoup4 It is an HTML parser library used for entity conversion. It simply creates an instance of BeautifulSoup given a string containing HTML entities. And then it retrieves the string attribute: Code - Python3 1== # importing BeautifulSoup from bs4 import BeautifulSoup print (BeautifulSoup('<').string) print (BeautifulSoup('&').string) Output : '<' '&' But the reverse for it is not possible i.e. for '<' in BeautifulSoup, a None result is obtained as it is invalid in HTML. BeautifulSoup looks for tokens that look similar to an entity and in order to convert the HTML entities, it replaces them with their corresponding value in the htmlentitydefs.name2codepoint dictionary which is there in the python standard library. Comment More infoAdvertise with us Next Article CSS element Selector M mathemagic Follow Improve Article Tags : Python Practice Tags : python Similar Reads Implementing Web Scraping in Python with BeautifulSoup There are mainly two ways to extract data from a website:Use the API of the website (if it exists). For example, Facebook has the Facebook Graph API which allows retrieval of data posted on Facebook.Access the HTML of the webpage and extract useful information/data from it. This technique is called 8 min read Installing and Loading BeautifulSoupInstalling BeautifulSoup: A Beginner's GuideBeautifulSoup is a Python library that makes it easy to extract data from HTML and XML files. It helps you find, navigate, and change the information in these files quickly and simply. It’s a great tool that can save you a lot of time when working with web data. The latest version of BeautifulSoup i 2 min read Beautifulsoup - Kinds of objectsPrerequisites: BeautifulSoup In this article, we will discuss different types of objects in Beautifulsoup. When the string or HTML document is given in the constructor of BeautifulSoup, this constructor converts this document to different python objects. The four major and important objects are : 4 min read How to Scrape Data From Local HTML Files using Python?BeautifulSoup module in Python allows us to scrape data from local HTML files. For some reason, website pages might get stored in a local (offline environment), and whenever in need, there may be requirements to get the data from them. Sometimes there may be a need to get data from multiple Locally 4 min read Navigating the HTML structure With Beautiful SoupFind the siblings of tags using BeautifulSoupPrerequisite: BeautifulSoup BeautifulSoup(bs4) is a Python library for pulling data out of HTML and XML files. This module does not come in built-in with Python. To install this type the below command in the terminal. In this article, we will learn about siblings in HTML tags using BeautifulSoup. He 2 min read Navigation with BeautifulSoupBeautifulSoup is a Python package used for parsing HTML and XML documents, it creates a parse tree for parsed paged which can be used for web scraping, it pulls data from HTML and XML files and works with your favorite parser to provide the idiomatic way of navigating, searching, and modifying the p 6 min read descendants generator – Python Beautifulsoupdescendants generator is provided by Beautiful Soup which is a web scraping framework for Python. Web scraping is the process of extracting data from the website using automated tools to make the process faster. The .contents and .children attribute only consider a tag’s direct children. The descend 2 min read Searching and Extract for specific tags With Beautiful SoupPython BeautifulSoup - find all classPrerequisite:- Requests , BeautifulSoup The task is to write a program to find all the classes for a given Website URL. In Beautiful Soup there is no in-built method to find all classes. Module needed: bs4: Beautiful Soup(bs4) is a Python library for pulling data out of HTML and XML files. This modu 2 min read BeautifulSoup - Search by text inside a tagPrerequisites: Beautifulsoup Beautifulsoup is a powerful python module used for web scraping. This article discusses how a specific text can be searched inside a given tag. INTRODUCTION: BeautifulSoup is a Python library for parsing HTML and XML documents. It provides a simple and intuitive API for 4 min read Scrape Google Search Results using Python BeautifulSoupIn this article, we are going to see how to Scrape Google Search Results using Python BeautifulSoup. Module Needed:bs4: Beautiful Soup(bs4) is a Python library for pulling data out of HTML and XML files. This module does not come built-in with Python. To install this type the below command in the te 3 min read Get tag name using Beautifulsoup in PythonPrerequisite: Beautifulsoup Installation Name property is provided by Beautiful Soup which is a web scraping framework for Python. Web scraping is the process of extracting data from the website using automated tools to make the process faster. Name object corresponds to the name of an XML or HTML t 1 min read Extracting an attribute value with beautifulsoup in PythonPrerequisite: Beautifulsoup Installation Attributes are provided by Beautiful Soup which is a web scraping framework for Python. Web scraping is the process of extracting data from the website using automated tools to make the process faster. A tag may have any number of attributes. For example, the 2 min read BeautifulSoup - Modifying the treePrerequisites: BeautifulSoup Beautifulsoup is a Python library used for web scraping. This powerful python tool can also be used to modify html webpages. This article depicts how beautifulsoup can be employed to modify the parse tree. BeautifulSoup is used to search the parse tree and allow you to m 5 min read Find the text of the given tag using BeautifulSoupWeb scraping is a process of using software bots called web scrapers in extracting information from HTML or XML content of a web page. Beautiful Soup is a library used for scraping data through python. Beautiful Soup works along with a parser to provide iteration, searching, and modifying the conten 2 min read Remove spaces from a string in PythonRemoving spaces from a string is a common task in Python that can be solved in multiple ways. For example, if we have a string like " g f g ", we might want the output to be "gfg" by removing all the spaces. Let's look at different methods to do so:Using replace() methodTo remove all spaces from a s 2 min read Understanding Character EncodingEver imagined how a computer is able to understand and display what you have written? Ever wondered what a UTF-8 or UTF-16 meant when you were going through some configurations? Just think about how "HeLLo WorlD" should be interpreted by a computer. We all know that a computer stores data in bits an 6 min read ASCII Vs UNICODEOverview :Unicode and ASCII are the most popular character encoding standards that are currently being used all over the world. Unicode is the universal character encoding used to process, store and facilitate the interchange of text data in any language while ASCII is used for the representation of 3 min read HTML TablesHTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the standard markup language used to create and structure web pages. It defines the layout of a webpage using elements and tags, allowing for the display of text, images, links, and multimedia content. As the foundation of nearly all websites, HTML is used in over 10 min read Creating new HTML elements With Beautiful SoupHTML AttributesHTML Attributes are special words used within the opening tag of an HTML element. They provide additional information about HTML elements. HTML attributes are used to configure and adjust the element's behavior, appearance, or functionality in a variety of ways. Each attribute has a name and a value 8 min read BeautifulSoup - Append to the contents of tagPrerequisites: Beautifulsoup Beautifulsoup is a Python library used to extract the contents from the webpages. It is used in extracting the contents from HTML and XML structures. To use this library, we need to install it first. Here we are going to append the text to the existing contents of tag. W 2 min read Modifying HTML with BeautifulSoupHow to insert a new tag into a BeautifulSoup object?In this article, we will see how to insert a new tag into a BeautifulSoup object. See the below examples to get a better idea about the topic. Example: HTML_DOC :  """        <html>        <head>          <title> Table Data </title>        </he 5 min read How to declare a custom attribute in HTML ?In this article, we will learn how to declare a custom attribute in HTML. Attributes are extra information that provides for the HTML elements. There are lots of predefined attributes in HTML. When the predefined attributes do not make sense to store extra data, custom attributes allow users to crea 2 min read How to Remove tags using BeautifulSoup in Python?Prerequisite- Beautifulsoup module In this article, we are going to draft a python script that removes a tag from the tree and then completely destroys it and its contents. For this, decompose() method is used which comes built into the module. Syntax: Beautifulsoup.Tag.decompose() Tag.decompose() r 2 min read Remove all style, scripts, and HTML tags using BeautifulSoupPrerequisite: BeautifulSoup, Requests Beautiful Soup is a Python library for pulling data out of HTML and XML files. In this article, we are going to discuss how to remove all style, scripts, and HTML tags using beautiful soup. Required Modules: bs4: Beautiful Soup (bs4) is a python library primaril 2 min read BeautifulSoup - Remove the contents of tagIn this article, we are going to see how to remove the content tag from HTML using BeautifulSoup. BeautifulSoup is a python library used for extracting html and xml files. Modules needed: BeautifulSoup: Our primary module contains a method to access a webpage over HTTP. For installation run this com 2 min read HTML Cleaning and Entity Conversion | PythonThe very important and always ignored task on web is the cleaning of text. Whenever one thinks to parse HTML, embedded Javascript and CSS is always avoided. The users are only interested in tags and text present on the webserver. lxml installation - It is a Python binding for C libraries - libxslt a 3 min read Working with CSS selectors With Beautiful SoupCSS element SelectorThe element selector in CSS is used to select HTML elements that are required to be styled. In a selector declaration, there is the name of the HTML element and the CSS properties which are to be applied to that element is written inside the brackets {}. Syntax:element { \\ CSS property}Example 1: T 2 min read Find the text of the given tag using BeautifulSoupWeb scraping is a process of using software bots called web scrapers in extracting information from HTML or XML content of a web page. Beautiful Soup is a library used for scraping data through python. Beautiful Soup works along with a parser to provide iteration, searching, and modifying the conten 2 min read BeautifulSoup - Find tags by CSS class with CSS SelectorsPrerequisites: Beautifulsoup Beautifulsoup is a Python library used for web scraping. BeautifulSoup object is provided by Beautiful Soup which is a web scraping framework for Python. Web scraping is the process of extracting data from the website using automated tools to make the process faster. The 2 min read Handling cookies and sessions with BeautifulSoup Retrieving Cookies in PythonRetrieving cookies in Python can be done by the use of the Requests library. Requests library is one of the integral part of Python for making HTTP requests to a specified URL. The below codes show different approaches to do show: 1. By requesting a session: Python3 1== # import the requests library 1 min read How cookies are used in a website?What are cookies? Cookies are small files which are stored on a user's computer. They are used to hold a modest amount of data specific to a particular client and website and can be accessed either by the web server or by the client computer When cookies were invented, they were basically little doc 3 min read BeautifulSoup - Error HandlingWhen scraping data from websites, we often face different types of errors. Some are caused by incorrect URLs, server issues or incorrect usage of scraping libraries like requests and BeautifulSoup. In this tutorial, we’ll explore some common exceptions encountered during web scraping and how to hand 3 min read Like