How to convert html `abbr` tag text to a text in parentheses in Python?

Question

I need to convert hundreds of html sentences generated by an outside source to readable text, and I have a question about conversion of abbr tag. Below is an example:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
text = "<abbr title=\"World Health Organization\" style=\"color:blue\">WHO</abbr> is a specialized agency of the <abbr title=\"United Nations\" style=\"color:#CCCC00\">UN</abbr>."
print (BeautifulSoup(text).get_text())

This code returns "WHO is a specialized agency of the UN.". However, what I want is "WHO (World Health Organization) is a specialized agency of the UN (United Nations)." Is there a way to do this? Maybe another module rather than BeautifulSoup?

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 23 '19 at 02:52

You can iterate over the elements in soup.contents:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup as soup
text = "<abbr title=\"World Health Organization\" style=\"color:blue\">WHO</abbr> is a specialized agency of the <abbr title=\"United Nations\" style=\"color:#CCCC00\">UN</abbr>."
d = ''.join(str(i) if i.name is None else f'{i.text} ({i["title"]})' for i in soup(text, 'html.parser').contents)

Output:

'WHO (World Health Organization) is a specialized agency of the UN (United Nations).'

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 23 '19 at 02:53

Probably, with one of the worst algorithms in the history of algorithms:

import re
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
text = "<abbr title=\"World Health Organization\" style=\"color:blue\">WHO</abbr> is a specialized agency of the <abbr title=\"United Nations\" style=\"color:#CCCC00\">UN</abbr>."
soup = BeautifulSoup(text, 'html.parser')
inside_abbrs = soup.find_all('abbr')

string_out = ''

for i in inside_abbrs: 
  s = BeautifulSoup(str(i), 'html.parser')
  t = s.find('abbr').attrs['title']
  split_soup = re.findall(r"[\w]+|[.,!?;]", soup.text)
  bind_caps = ''.join(re.findall(r'[A-Z]', t))

  for word in split_soup:
    if word == bind_caps:
      string_out += word + " (" + t + ") " 
      break
    else:
      string_out += word + " "

string_out = string_out.strip()
string_out += '.'
print(string_out)

Output

WHO (World Health Organization) WHO is a specialized agency of the UN (United Nations).

How to convert html `abbr` tag text to a text in parentheses in Python?

2 Answers2

Output