How to Parse XML
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.
Python has several popular packages that can parse HTML using CSS selectors.
The most popular one is BeautifulSoup which can execute CSS selectors through the select()
and select_one()
methods:
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
soup = BeautifulSoup("""
<a>link 1</a>
<a>link 2</a>
""")
print(soup.select_one('a'))
"<a>link 1</a>"
print(soup.select('a'))
["<a>link 1</a>", "<a>link 2</a>"]
Another popular package is parsel (also used by scrapy) which can execute CSS selectors through the css()
method:
from parsel import Selector
soup = Selector("""
<a>link 1</a>
<a>link 2</a>
""")
print(soup.css('a').get())
"<a>link 1</a>"
print(soup.css('a').getall())
["<a>link 1</a>", "<a>link 2</a>"]
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