How can I extract data from a html tag using Python?

Question

I want to extract the translation of a word in online dictionary. For example, the html code for 'car':

<ol class="sense_list level_1">
     <li class="sense_list_item level_1" value="1"><span class="def">any vehicle on wheels</span></li>

How can I extract "any vehicle on wheels" in Python with beautifulsoup or any other modules?

thanks for all answers. but that html code has other lines similar to above line with only one difference: value="1" .for each line value changes. how can i extract line with value="1" — Sara Santana, Mar 24 '15 at 17:49
Seems like a duplicate of http://stackoverflow.com/questions/328356/extracting-text-from-html-file-using-python — alexander.biskop, Mar 24 '15 at 18:14
I have modified my answer to include start tag and attributes. — ILostMySpoon, Mar 24 '15 at 18:32
@SaraSantana updated the answer - the last option checks for the `value` attribute value. — alecxe, Mar 24 '15 at 20:03

alecxe · Answer 1 · 2015-03-24T20:03:10.500

1

There are multiple ways to reach the desired element.

Probably the simplest would be to find it by class:

soup.find('span', class_='def').text

or, with a CSS selector:

soup.select('span.def')[0].text

or, additionally checking the parents:

soup.select('ol.level_1 > li.level_1 > span.def')[0].text

or:

soup.select('ol.level_1 > li[value=1] > span.def')[0].text

edited Mar 24 '15 at 20:03

answered Mar 24 '15 at 17:29

alecxe

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 24 '15 at 18:33

1

I solve it by beautifulsoup:

soup = bs4.BeautifulSoup(html)
q1=soup.find('li', class_="sense_list_item level_1",value='1').text

answered Mar 24 '15 at 18:33

Sara Santana

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Mar 24 '15 at 17:32

0

Assuming that is the only HTML code given, you can use NLTK.

import nltk 

#load html chunk into variable htmlstring#
extract = nltk.clean_html(htmlstring)
print(extract)

answered Mar 24 '15 at 17:32

FTA

3 Answers3