html-text 0.5.0

Install

Install with pip:

pip install html-text

The package depends on lxml, so you might need to install additional packages: http://lxml.de/installation.html

Usage

Extract text from HTML:

>>> import html_text
>>> html_text.extract_text('<h1>Hello</h1> world!')
'Hello\n\nworld!'

>>> html_text.extract_text('<h1>Hello</h1> world!', guess_layout=False)
'Hello world!'

Passed html is first cleaned from invisible non-text content such as styles, and then text is extracted.

You can also pass an already parsed lxml.html.HtmlElement:

>>> import html_text
>>> tree = html_text.parse_html('<h1>Hello</h1> world!')
>>> html_text.extract_text(tree)
'Hello\n\nworld!'

If you want, you can handle cleaning manually; use lower-level html_text.etree_to_text in this case:

>>> import html_text
>>> tree = html_text.parse_html('<h1>Hello<style>.foo{}</style>!</h1>')
>>> cleaned_tree = html_text.cleaner.clean_html(tree)
>>> html_text.etree_to_text(cleaned_tree)
'Hello!'

parsel.Selector objects are also supported; you can define a parsel.Selector to extract text only from specific elements:

>>> import html_text
>>> sel = html_text.cleaned_selector('<h1>Hello</h1> world!')
>>> subsel = sel.xpath('//h1')
>>> html_text.selector_to_text(subsel)
'Hello'

NB parsel.Selector objects are not cleaned automatically, you need to call html_text.cleaned_selector first.

Main functions and objects:

• html_text.extract_text accepts html and returns extracted text.

• html_text.etree_to_text accepts parsed lxml Element and returns extracted text; it is a lower-level function, cleaning is not handled here.

• html_text.cleaner is an lxml.html.clean.Cleaner instance which can be used with html_text.etree_to_text; its options are tuned for speed and text extraction quality.

• html_text.cleaned_selector accepts html as text or as lxml.html.HtmlElement, and returns cleaned parsel.Selector.

• html_text.selector_to_text accepts parsel.Selector and returns extracted text.

If guess_layout is True (default), a newline is added before and after newline_tags, and two newlines are added before and after double_newline_tags. This heuristic makes the extracted text more similar to how it is rendered in the browser. Default newline and double newline tags can be found in html_text.NEWLINE_TAGS and html_text.DOUBLE_NEWLINE_TAGS.

It is possible to customize how newlines are added, using newline_tags and double_newline_tags arguments (which are html_text.NEWLINE_TAGS and html_text.DOUBLE_NEWLINE_TAGS by default). For example, don’t add a newline after <div> tags:

>>> newline_tags = html_text.NEWLINE_TAGS - {'div'}
>>> html_text.extract_text('<div>Hello</div> world!',
...                        newline_tags=newline_tags)
'Hello world!'

Apart from just getting text from the page (e.g. for display or search), one intended usage of this library is for machine learning (feature extraction). If you want to use the text of the html page as a feature (e.g. for classification), this library gives you plain text that you can later feed into a standard text classification pipeline. If you feel that you need html structure as well, check out webstruct library.

0.5.0 (2018-11-19)

Parsel dependency is removed in this release, though parsel is still supported.

• parsel package is no longer required to install and use html-text;

• html_text.etree_to_text function allows to extract text from lxml Elements;

• html_text.cleaner is an lxml.html.clean.Cleaner instance with options tuned for text extraction speed and quality;

• test and documentation improvements;

• Python 3.7 support.

0.4.1 (2018-09-25)

Fixed a regression in 0.4.0 release: text was empty when html_text.extract_text is called with a node with text, but without children.

0.4.0 (2018-09-25)

This is a backwards-incompatible release: by default html_text functions now add newlines after elements, if appropriate, to make the extracted text to look more like how it is rendered in a browser.

To turn it off, pass guess_layout=False option to html_text functions.

• guess_layout option to to make extracted text look more like how it is rendered in browser.

• Add tests of layout extraction for real webpages.

0.3.0 (2017-10-12)

• Expose functions that operate on selectors, use .//text() to extract text from selector.

0.2.1 (2017-05-29)

• Packaging fix (include CHANGES.rst)

0.2.0 (2017-05-29)

• Fix unwanted joins of words with inline tags: spaces are added for inline tags too, but a heuristic is used to preserve punctuation without extra spaces.

• Accept parsed html trees.

0.1.1 (2017-01-16)

• Travis-CI and codecov.io integrations added

0.1.0 (2016-09-27)

• First release on PyPI.