convert xhtml back to html

[Tim Arnold]

hi, I've got lots of xhtml pages that need to be fed to MS HTML Workshop to
create CHM files. That application really hates xhtml, so I need to convert
self-ending tags (e.g. <br />) to plain html (e.g. <br>).

Seems simple enough, but I'm having some trouble with it. regexps trip up
because I also have to take into account 'img', 'meta', 'link' tags, not
just the simple 'br' and 'hr' tags. Well, maybe there's a simple way to do
that with regexps, but my simpleminded <img[^(/>)]+/doesn't work. I'm not
enough of a regexp pro to figure out that lookahead stuff.

I'm not sure where to start now; I looked at BeautifulSoup and
BeautifulStoneS oup, but I can't see how to modify the actual tag.

thanks,
--Tim Arnold

[Gary Herron]

Tim Arnold wrote:

hi, I've got lots of xhtml pages that need to be fed to MS HTML Workshop to
create CHM files. That application really hates xhtml, so I need to convert
self-ending tags (e.g. <br />) to plain html (e.g. <br>).

Seems simple enough, but I'm having some trouble with it. regexps trip up
because I also have to take into account 'img', 'meta', 'link' tags, not
just the simple 'br' and 'hr' tags. Well, maybe there's a simple way to do
that with regexps, but my simpleminded <img[^(/>)]+/doesn't work. I'm not
enough of a regexp pro to figure out that lookahead stuff.

I'm not sure where to start now; I looked at BeautifulSoup and
BeautifulStoneS oup, but I can't see how to modify the actual tag.

thanks,
--Tim Arnold
--
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list

Whether or not you can find an application that does what you want, I
don't know, but at the very least I can say this much.

You should not be reading and parsing the text yourself! XHTML is valid
XML, and there a lots of ways to read and parse XML with Python.
(ElementTree is what I use, but other choices exist.) Once you use an
existing package to read your files into an internal tree structure
representation, it should be a relatively easy job to traverse the tree
to emit the tags and text you want.
Gary Herron

[Arnaud Delobelle]

"Tim Arnold" <ti********@sas .comwrites:

hi, I've got lots of xhtml pages that need to be fed to MS HTML Workshop to
create CHM files. That application really hates xhtml, so I need to convert
self-ending tags (e.g. <br />) to plain html (e.g. <br>).

Seems simple enough, but I'm having some trouble with it. regexps trip up
because I also have to take into account 'img', 'meta', 'link' tags, not
just the simple 'br' and 'hr' tags. Well, maybe there's a simple way to do
that with regexps, but my simpleminded <img[^(/>)]+/doesn't work. I'm not
enough of a regexp pro to figure out that lookahead stuff.

Hi, I'm not sure if this is very helpful but the following works on
the very simple example below.

>>import re
xhtml = '<p>hello <img src="/img.png"/spam <br/bye </p>'
xtag = re.compile(r'<([^>]*?)/>')
xtag.sub(r'<\ 1>', xhtml)

'<p>hello <img src="/img.png"spam <brbye </p>'
--
Arnaud

[Tim Arnold]

"Gary Herron" <gh*****@island training.comwro te in message
news:ma******** *************** *************** @python.org...

Tim Arnold wrote:

>hi, I've got lots of xhtml pages that need to be fed to MS HTML Workshop
to create CHM files. That application really hates xhtml, so I need to
convert self-ending tags (e.g. <br />) to plain html (e.g. <br>).

Seems simple enough, but I'm having some trouble with it. regexps trip up
because I also have to take into account 'img', 'meta', 'link' tags, not
just the simple 'br' and 'hr' tags. Well, maybe there's a simple way to
do that with regexps, but my simpleminded <img[^(/>)]+/doesn't work.
I'm not enough of a regexp pro to figure out that lookahead stuff.

I'm not sure where to start now; I looked at BeautifulSoup and
BeautifulStone Soup, but I can't see how to modify the actual tag.

thanks,
--Tim Arnold
--
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list

Whether or not you can find an application that does what you want, I
don't know, but at the very least I can say this much.

You should not be reading and parsing the text yourself! XHTML is valid
XML, and there a lots of ways to read and parse XML with Python.
(ElementTree is what I use, but other choices exist.) Once you use an
existing package to read your files into an internal tree structure
representation, it should be a relatively easy job to traverse the tree to
emit the tags and text you want.
Gary Herron

I agree and I'd really rather not parse it myself. However, ET will clean up
the file which in my case includes some comments required as metadata, so
that won't work. Oh, I could get ET to read it and write a new parser--I see
what you mean. I think I need to subclass so I could get ET to honor those
comments too.
That's one way to go, I was just hoping for something easier.
thanks,
--Tim

[Tim Arnold]

"Arnaud Delobelle" <ar*****@google mail.comwrote in message
news:m2******** ****@googlemail .com...

"Tim Arnold" <ti********@sas .comwrites:

>hi, I've got lots of xhtml pages that need to be fed to MS HTML Workshop
to
create CHM files. That application really hates xhtml, so I need to
convert
self-ending tags (e.g. <br />) to plain html (e.g. <br>).

Seems simple enough, but I'm having some trouble with it. regexps trip up
because I also have to take into account 'img', 'meta', 'link' tags, not
just the simple 'br' and 'hr' tags. Well, maybe there's a simple way to
do
that with regexps, but my simpleminded <img[^(/>)]+/doesn't work. I'm
not
enough of a regexp pro to figure out that lookahead stuff.

Hi, I'm not sure if this is very helpful but the following works on
the very simple example below.

>>>import re
xhtml = '<p>hello <img src="/img.png"/spam <br/bye </p>'
xtag = re.compile(r'<([^>]*?)/>')
xtag.sub(r'< \1>', xhtml)

'<p>hello <img src="/img.png"spam <brbye </p>'
--
Arnaud

Thanks for that. It is helpful--I guess I had a brain malfunction. Your
example will work for me I'm pretty sure, except in some cases where the IMG
alt text contains a gt sign. I'm not sure that's even possible, so maybe
this will do the job.
thanks,
--Tim

[=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Walter_D=F6rwald?=]

Arnaud Delobelle wrote:

"Tim Arnold" <ti********@sas .comwrites:

>hi, I've got lots of xhtml pages that need to be fed to MS HTML Workshop to
create CHM files. That application really hates xhtml, so I need to convert
self-ending tags (e.g. <br />) to plain html (e.g. <br>).

Seems simple enough, but I'm having some trouble with it. regexps trip up
because I also have to take into account 'img', 'meta', 'link' tags, not
just the simple 'br' and 'hr' tags. Well, maybe there's a simple way to do
that with regexps, but my simpleminded <img[^(/>)]+/doesn't work. I'm not
enough of a regexp pro to figure out that lookahead stuff.

Hi, I'm not sure if this is very helpful but the following works on
the very simple example below.

>>>import re
xhtml = '<p>hello <img src="/img.png"/spam <br/bye </p>'
xtag = re.compile(r'<([^>]*?)/>')
xtag.sub(r'< \1>', xhtml)

'<p>hello <img src="/img.png"spam <brbye </p>'

You might try XIST (http://www.livinglogic.de/Python/xist):

Code looks like this:

from ll.xist import parsers
from ll.xist.ns import html

xhtml = '<p>hello <img src="/img.png"/spam <br/bye </p>'

doc = parsers.parsest ring(xhtml)
print doc.bytes(xhtml =0)

This outputs:

<p>hello <img src="/img.png"spam <brbye </p>

(and a warning that the alt attribute is missing in the img ;))

Servus,
Walter

[bryan rasmussen]

I'll second the recommendation to use xsl-t, set the output to html.
The code for an XSL-T to do it would be basically:
<xsl:styleshe et xmlns:xsl="http ://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0">
<xsl:output method="html" />
<xsl:template match="/"><xsl:copy-of select="/"/></xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

you would probably want to do other stuff than just copy it out but
that's another case.

Also, from my recollection the solution in CHM to make XHTML br
elements behave correctly was <br /as opposed to <br/>, at any rate
I've done projects generating CHM and my output markup was well formed
XML at all occasions.

Cheers,
Bryan Rasmussen

On Thu, Apr 24, 2008 at 5:34 PM, Tim Arnold <ti********@sas .comwrote:

hi, I've got lots of xhtml pages that need to be fed to MS HTML Workshop to
create CHM files. That application really hates xhtml, so I need to convert
self-ending tags (e.g. <br />) to plain html (e.g. <br>).

Seems simple enough, but I'm having some trouble with it. regexps trip up
because I also have to take into account 'img', 'meta', 'link' tags, not
just the simple 'br' and 'hr' tags. Well, maybe there's a simple way to do
that with regexps, but my simpleminded <img[^(/>)]+/doesn't work. I'm not
enough of a regexp pro to figure out that lookahead stuff.

I'm not sure where to start now; I looked at BeautifulSoup and
BeautifulStoneS oup, but I can't see how to modify the actual tag.

thanks,
--Tim Arnold
--
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list

[Stefan Behnel]

Tim Arnold wrote:

hi, I've got lots of xhtml pages that need to be fed to MS HTML Workshop to
create CHM files. That application really hates xhtml, so I need to convert
self-ending tags (e.g. <br />) to plain html (e.g. <br>).

This should do the job in lxml 2.x:

from lxml import etree

tree = etree.parse("th efile.xhtml")
tree.write("the file.html", method="html")

http://codespeak.net/lxml

Stefan

[bryan rasmussen]

wow, that's pretty nice there.

Just to know: what's the performance like on XML instances of 1 GB?

Cheers,
Bryan Rasmussen
On Thu, Apr 24, 2008 at 9:55 PM, Stefan Behnel <st*******@behn el.dewrote:

Tim Arnold wrote:

hi, I've got lots of xhtml pages that need to be fed to MS HTML Workshop to
create CHM files. That application really hates xhtml, so I need to convert
self-ending tags (e.g. <br />) to plain html (e.g. <br>).

This should do the job in lxml 2.x:

from lxml import etree

tree = etree.parse("th efile.xhtml")
tree.write("the file.html", method="html")

http://codespeak.net/lxml

Stefan
--
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list

[Stefan Behnel]

bryan rasmussen top-posted:

On Thu, Apr 24, 2008 at 9:55 PM, Stefan Behnel <st*******@behn el.dewrote:

> from lxml import etree

tree = etree.parse("th efile.xhtml")
tree.write("the file.html", method="html")

http://codespeak.net/lxml

wow, that's pretty nice there.

Just to know: what's the performance like on XML instances of 1 GB?

That's a pretty big file, although you didn't mention what kind of XML
language you want to handle and what you want to do with it.

lxml is pretty conservative in terms of memory:

http://blog.ianbicking.org/2008/03/3...r-performance/

But the exact numbers depend on your data. lxml holds the XML tree in memory,
which is a lot bigger than the serialised data. So, for example, if you have
2GB of RAM and want to parse a serialised 1GB XML file full of little
one-element integers into an in-memory tree, get prepared for lunch. With a
lot of long text string content instead, it might still fit.

However, lxml also has a couple of step-by-step and stream parsing APIs:

http://codespeak.net/lxml/parsing.ht...rser-interface
http://codespeak.net/lxml/parsing.ht...rser-interface
http://codespeak.net/lxml/parsing.ht...e-and-iterwalk

They might do what you want.

Stefan