This is a simple wrapper around lxml, which adds some nice features, which make work with lxml better. This library covers all my needs in html parsing.
lxml obviously :3
- Nice jquery-like css selectors
- Simple access to element attributes
- Easy way for convert html to other format (bbcode, markdown, etc)
- Few nice functions for work with text
- And, of course this saves all original features of lxml
Main function of module (as I mind) is leaf.parse, this function takes string with html as an argument, and returns leaf.Parser object, which wraps lxml object. With this object you can do anything you want, like this:
document = leaf.parse(sample)
links = document('div#menu a') # get links in div with id menu through css selectors
Or you can do this:
link = document.get('div#menu a') # get first link or return None
And you can get attributes from these results like this:
print link.onclick
Anyway, you can use standard lxml methods like object.xpath, and they returns results wrapped into leaf.Parser. So, my favorite feature is parsing html into bbcode (markdown, etc):
# Lets define simple formatter, which pass text
# and wraps links into [url][/url] (like bbcode)
def omgcode_formatter(element, children):
# Replace <br> tag with line break
if element.tag == 'br':
return '\n'
# Wrap links into [url][/url]
if element.tag == 'a':
return u"[url=link}]{text}[/url]".format(link=element.href, text=children)
# Return children only for other elements.
if children:
return children
This function will be recursively called with element and children (this is string with children parsing result). So, lets call this parser in some leaf.Parser object:
document.parse(omgcode_formatter)
More detailed examples availible in the tests.
Finally, this library has some nice functions for work with text:
to_unicode -- Convert string to unicode string
strip_accents -- Strip accents from a string
strip_symbols -- Strip ugly unicode symbols from a string
strip_spaces -- Strip excess spaces from a string
strip_linebreaks -- Strip excess line breaks from a string
