[Python-Dev] Is this a bug of the HTMLParser?

[Zhang Chiyuan]

Hi all,

I'm using BeautifulSoup to parsing an HTML page and find it refused to
parse the page. By looking at the backtrace, I found it is a problem
with the python built-in HTMLParser.py. In fact, the web page I'm
parsing is with some Chinese characters. there is a tag like <img
src=/foo/bar.png alt=中文> , note this is legacy html page where the
attributes are not quoted. However, the regexp defined in
HTMLParser.py is :

 attrfind = re.compile(
     r'\s*([a-zA-Z_][-.:a-zA-Z_0-9]*)(\s*=\s*'
     r'(\'[^\']*\'|"[^"]*"|[-a-zA-Z0-9./,:;+*%?!&$\(\)_#=~@]*))?')

Note that the Chinese character (also any other non-english
characters), so it fire an error parsing this. I'm not sure whether
the HTML standard allow un-quoted non-ASCII characters in the
attributes. If it allows, this seems to be a bug. and the regexp to
better be [^>\s] IMHO.

BTW: It seems something like :

<script>
var st = "<a></";
</script>

can not be parsed. :-/

--
pluskid
http://blog.pluskid.org