Clean Up HTML in Python

16

votes

I'm aggregating content from a few external sources and am finding that some of it contains errors in its HTML/DOM. A good example would be HTML missing closing tags or malformed tag attributes. Is there a way to clean up the errors in Python natively or any third party modules I could install?

pythonhtmldjango

Were any of these answers what you were looking for? If you need more info we can certainly help? - JudoWill

@JudoWill: Yeah I was able to get BeautifulSoup and Tidy set up. Unfortunately they weren't catching a lot of the issues I was having. I ended up building my own function to go cycle through the DOM and fix the issues. Thanks for the help! - Joel

Could you post your own function as an answer. This is an issue that I have a lot of the time and I'm always looking for new solutions. :) - JudoWill

18

votes

I would suggest Beautifulsoup. It has a wonderful parser that can deal with malformed tags quite gracefully. Once you've read in the entire tree you can just output the result.

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
tree = BeautifulSoup(bad_html)
good_html = tree.prettify()

I've used this many times and it works wonders. If you're simply pulling out the data from bad-html then BeautifulSoup really shines when it comes to pulling out data.

8

votes

Here is an example of cleaning up HTML using the lxml.html.clean.Cleaner module:

import sys

from lxml.html.clean import Cleaner


def sanitize(dirty_html):
    cleaner = Cleaner(page_structure=True,
                  meta=True,
                  embedded=True,
                  links=True,
                  style=True,
                  processing_instructions=True,
                  inline_style=True,
                  scripts=True,
                  javascript=True,
                  comments=True,
                  frames=True,
                  forms=True,
                  annoying_tags=True,
                  remove_unknown_tags=True,
                  safe_attrs_only=True,
                  safe_attrs=frozenset(['src','color', 'href', 'title', 'class', 'name', 'id']),
                  remove_tags=('span', 'font', 'div')
                  )

    return cleaner.clean_html(dirty_html)


if __name__ == '__main__':

    with open(sys.argv[1]) as fin:

        print(sanitize(fin.read()))

Check out the docs for a full list of options you can pass to the Cleaner.

3

votes

There are python bindings for the HTML Tidy Library Project, but automatically cleaning up broken HTML is a tough nut to crack. It's not so different from trying to automatically fix source code -- there are just too many possibilities. You'll still need to review the output and almost certainly make further fixes by hand.

3

votes

I am using lxml to convert HTML to proper (well-formed) XML:

from lxml import etree
tree   = etree.HTML(input_text.replace('\r', ''))
output_text = '\n'.join([ etree.tostring(stree, pretty_print=True, method="xml") 
                          for stree in tree ])

... and doing lot of removing of 'dangerous elements' in the middle....

1

votes

This can be done using the tidy_document function in tidylib module.

import tidylib
html = '<html>...</html>'
inputEncoding = 'utf8'
options = {
    str("output-xhtml"): True, #"output-xml" : True
    str("quiet"): True,
    str("show-errors"): 0,
    str("force-output"): True,
    str("numeric-entities"): True,
    str("show-warnings"): False,
    str("input-encoding"): inputEncoding,
    str("output-encoding"): "utf8",
    str("indent"): False,
    str("tidy-mark"): False,
    str("wrap"): 0
    };
document, errors = tidylib.tidy_document(html, options=options)

Clean Up HTML in Python

5 Answers