When web scraping, we might need to represent scrape HTML data as plain text. For this we can use BeautifulSoup's get_text() method which extracts all visible HTML text and most importantly ignores invisible details such as <script> elements:
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
soup = BeautifulSoup("""
<body>
<article>
<h1>Article title</h1>
<p>first paragraph and a <a>link</a></p>
<script>var invisible="javascript variable";</script>
</article>
</body>
""")
# if possible it's best to restrict html to a specific element
element = soup.find('article')
text = element.get_text()
print(text)
"""
Article title
first paragraph and a link
"""
In this tutorial, we'll take a deep dive into lxml, a powerful Python library that allows for parsing HTML and XML effectively. We'll start by explaining what lxml is, how to install it and using lxml for parsing HTML and XML files. Finally, we'll go over a practical web scraping with lxml.
In this article, we'll explain about XML parsing. We'll start by defining XML files, their format and how to navigate them for data extraction.
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