Fetching data from a HTML file

[Jon Clements]

On Friday, 23 March 2012 13:52:05 UTC, Sangeet  wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I've got to fetch data from the snippet below and have been trying to match the digits in this to specifically to specific groups. But I can't seem to figure how to go about stripping the tags! :(
> 
> <tr><td align="center"><b>Sum</b></td><td></td><td align='center' class="green">245</td><td align='center' class="red">11</td><td align='center'>0</td><td align='center' >256</td><td align='center' >1.496 [min]</td></tr>
> </table>
> 
> Actually, I'm working on ROBOT Framework, and haven't been able to figure out how to read data from HTML tables. Reading from the source, is the best (read rudimentary) way I could come up with. Any suggestions are welcome!
> 
> Thanks,
> Sangeet

I would personally use lxml - a quick example:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import lxml.html

text = """
<tr><td align="center"><b>Sum</b></td>​<td></td><td align='center' class="green">245</td><td align='center' class="red">11</td><td align='center'>0</td><td align='center' >256</td><td align='center' >1.496 [min]</td></tr>
</table>
"""

table = lxml.html.fromstring(text)
for tr in table.xpath('//tr'):
    print [ (el.get('class', ''), el.text_content()) for el in tr.iterfind('td') ]

[('', 'Sum'), ('', ''), ('green', '245'), ('red', '11'), ('', '0'), ('', '256'), ('', '1.496 [min]')]

It does a reasonable job, but if it doesn't work quite right, then there's a .fromstring(parser=...) option, and you should be able to pass in ElementSoup and try your luck from there. 

hth,

Jon.