Get return value from HTMLParser class to main class

Question

Here my current code:

HTMLParser class:

class MyHTMLParser(HTMLParser):
    def handle_starttag(self, tag, attrs):
        if tag == "a":
            for name, value in attrs:
                if name == "href":
                    print value

Main class:

html = urllib2.urlopen(url).read()
MyHTMLParser().feed(html)

TODO: Any idea to make "value" can be return to main class? Thank for advance.

Does [this answer](http://stackoverflow.com/a/3276119/89391) help? — miku, Feb 12 '14 at 08:25

Martijn Pieters · Accepted Answer · 2014-02-12T08:39:52.507

2

You store information you want to collect on your parser instance:

class MyHTMLParser(HTMLParser):
    def __init__(self):
         HTMLParser.__init__()
         self.links = []

    def handle_starttag(self, tag, attrs):
        if tag == "a" and 'href' in attrs:
            self.links.append(attrs['href'])

then after you have fed HTML into the parser you can retrieve the links attribute from the instance

parser = MyHTMLParser()
parser.feed(html)
print parser.links

For parsing HTML, I can heartily recommend you look at BeautifulSoup instead:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

soup = BeautifulSoup(html)
links = [a['href'] for a in soup.find_all('a', href=True)]

edited Feb 12 '14 at 08:39

answered Feb 12 '14 at 08:26

Martijn Pieters

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can't use BeautifulSoup because I'm using python 2.7 version – azmilhafiz Feb 12 '14 at 08:42
@azmilhafiz: BeautifulSoup is an add-on that works on Python 2 and Python 3, including Python 2.7. – Martijn Pieters Feb 12 '14 at 08:43

Get return value from HTMLParser class to main class

1 Answers1