elementtree question

Mon Sep 24 04:04:22 EDT 2007

Tim Arnold wrote:
> Hi, I'm using elementtree and elementtidy to work with some HTML files. For 
> some of these files I need to enclose the body content in a new div tag, 
> like this:
> <body>
>   <div class="remapped">
>    original contents...
>   </div>
> </body>

Give lxml.etree (or lxml.html) a try:

    tree = etree.parse("http://url.to/some.html", etree.HTMLParser())
    body = tree.find("body")

and then:

    div = etree.Element("div", {"class" : "remapped"})
    div.extend(body)
    body.append(div)

or alternatively:

    children = list(body)
    div = etree.SubElement(body, "div", {"class" : "remapped"})
    div.extend(children)

http://codespeak.net/lxml/

and for lxml.html, which is currently in alpha status:

http://codespeak.net/lxml/dev/

ET 1.3 will also support the extend() function, BTW.

Stefan