Hands-on HTML Table Parser/Matrix?

[robert]

Often I want to extract some web table contents. Formats are
mostly static, simple text & numbers in it, other tags to be
stripped off. So a simple & fast approach would be ok.

What of the different modules around is most easy to use, stable,
up-to-date, iterator access or best matrix-access (without need
for callback functions,classes.. for basic tasks)?
Robert

[Tim Cook]

There are couple of HTML examples using Pyparsing here:

http://pyparsing.wikispaces.com/Examples
--Tim

On Sun, 2008-07-06 at 14:40 +0200, robert wrote:

Often I want to extract some web table contents. Formats are
mostly static, simple text & numbers in it, other tags to be
stripped off. So a simple & fast approach would be ok.

What of the different modules around is most easy to use, stable,
up-to-date, iterator access or best matrix-access (without need
for callback functions,classes.. for basic tasks)?
Robert
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Timothy Cook, MSc
Health Informatics Research & Development Services
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[robert]

Tim Cook wrote:

>
On Sun, 2008-07-06 at 14:40 +0200, robert wrote:

>Often I want to extract some web table contents. Formats are
mostly static, simple text & numbers in it, other tags to be
stripped off. So a simple & fast approach would be ok.

What of the different modules around is most easy to use, stable,
up-to-date, iterator access or best matrix-access (without need
for callback functions,classes.. for basic tasks)?

There are couple of HTML examples using Pyparsing here:

http://pyparsing.wikispaces.com/Examples

hm - nothing special with HTML tables.

Meanwhile:

I dislike "ClientTable" (file centric, too much parsing errors in
real world).

"TableParse" works. Very simple&fast 70-liner regexp->matrix and
strip/clean/HTML-entities conversion. Fast success hands-on.
Doesn't separate nested tables and such complexities consciously -
but works though for simple hands-on tasks in real world.
Robert

[Sebastian \lunar\ Wiesner]

robert <no*****@no-spam-no-spam.invalid>:

Often I want to extract some web table contents. Formats are
mostly static, simple text & numbers in it, other tags to be
stripped off. So a simple & fast approach would be ok.

What of the different modules around is most easy to use, stable,
up-to-date, iterator access or best matrix-access (without need
for callback functions,classes.. for basic tasks)?

Not more than a handful of lines with lxml.html:

def htmltable2matrix(table):
"""Converts a html table to a matrix.

:param table: The html table element
:type table: An lxml element
"""
matrix = []
for row in table:
matrix.append([e.text_content() for e in row])
return matrix

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