How to Parse JavaScript Type Html

Question

<script type="text/javascript">
var modelData = [{"Id":958,"Date":"20160428","Title":"Design","Description":"London Auction 28 April 2016","Department":"Design","Location":"LONDON","Permalink":"/auctions/auction/UK050116","Year":"2016","Image":"/Xigen/image.ashx?path=\\\\diskstation\\website\\Certificates\\UK050116\\UK050116.jpg\u0026width=308\u0026height=222","addThis":" addthis:url=\"https://www.example.com/auctions/auction/UK050116\" ","results_html":"\u003cli class=\"expandable past-auction-exp closed\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"#\"\u003eVIEW RESULTS\u003c/a\u003e\u003cdiv class=\"panel\" style=\"display:none\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"/auctions/auction/UK050116\"\u003eOnline\u003c/a\u003e\u003ca target=\"_blank\" href=\"/Xigen/file.ashx?path=\\\\diskstation\\website\\Media\\Auction\\auctionResultsFile_UK050116.pdf\"\u003ePDF\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003c/li\u003e","Download_catalog_html":"\u003cli class=\"expandable past-auction-exp closed\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"#\"\u003eCATALOGUES\u003c/a\u003e\u003cdiv class=\"panel\" style=\"display:none\"\u003e\u003ca target=\"_blank\" id=\"linkDownloadCatalog\" href=\"http://www.example.com/Xigen/file.ashx?path=\\\\diskstation\\website\\Certificates/UK050116/UK050116_catalog.pdf\"\u003eDownload Catalogue\u003c/a\u003e\u003ca href=\"/catalogues/buy\"\u003ePurchase Catalogue\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003c/li\u003e"}]</script>

I want to parse Date, Title, Link, how can i parse it. I try to use PyQt4 but also couldn't do it.

score 1 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:23

Assuming, this is located inside the script tag, you can use the BeautifulSoup module to parse the HTML and to locate the script by the same regular expression that you would use to extract the modelData value. Then, after fixing the modelData value to be "loadable" with json.loads(), you would have a Python data structure you can easily work with:

import json
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

import re

data = """
<script>
var modelData = [{"Id":958,"Date":"20160428","Title":"Design","Description":"London Auction 28 April 2016","Department":"Design","Location":"LONDON","Permalink":"/auctions/auction/UK050116","Year":"2016","Image":"/Xigen/image.ashx?path=\\\\diskstation\\website\\Certificates\\UK050116\\UK050116.jpg\u0026width=308\u0026height=222","addThis":" addthis:url=\"https://www.example.com/auctions/auction/UK050116\" ","results_html":"\u003cli class=\"expandable past-auction-exp closed\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"#\"\u003eVIEW RESULTS\u003c/a\u003e\u003cdiv class=\"panel\" style=\"display:none\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"/auctions/auction/UK050116\"\u003eOnline\u003c/a\u003e\u003ca target=\"_blank\" href=\"/Xigen/file.ashx?path=\\\\diskstation\\website\\Media\\Auction\\auctionResultsFile_UK050116.pdf\"\u003ePDF\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003c/li\u003e","Download_catalog_html":"\u003cli class=\"expandable past-auction-exp closed\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"#\"\u003eCATALOGUES\u003c/a\u003e\u003cdiv class=\"panel\" style=\"display:none\"\u003e\u003ca target=\"_blank\" id=\"linkDownloadCatalog\" href=\"http://www.example.com/Xigen/file.ashx?path=\\\\diskstation\\website\\Certificates/UK050116/UK050116_catalog.pdf\"\u003eDownload Catalogue\u003c/a\u003e\u003ca href=\"/catalogues/buy\"\u003ePurchase Catalogue\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003c/li\u003e"}]
</script>
"""

soup = BeautifulSoup(data, 'lxml')

pattern = re.compile(r"var modelData = (\[.*?\])", re.MULTILINE | re.DOTALL)
script = soup.find("script", text=pattern)

s = pattern.search(script.text).group(1).encode('unicode_escape')
while True:
    try:
        result = json.loads(s)   # try to parse...
        break                    # parsing worked -> exit loop
    except Exception as e:
        # "Expecting , delimiter: line 34 column 54 (char 1158)"
        # position of unexpected character after '"'
        unexp = int(re.findall(r'\(char (\d+)\)', str(e))[0])
        # position of unescaped '"' before that
        unesc = s.rfind(r'"', 0, unexp)
        s = s[:unesc] + r'\"' + s[unesc+1:]
        # position of correspondig closing '"' (+2 for inserted '\')
        closg = s.find(r'"', unesc + 2)
        s = s[:closg] + r'\"' + s[closg+1:]

item = result[0]
print(item["Id"])
print(item["Title"])

Prints (works on Python 2 only in this state):

958
Design

How to Parse JavaScript Type Html

1 Answers1