BeautifulSoup module in Python allows us to scrape data from local HTML files. For some reason, website pages might get stored in a local (offline environment), and whenever in need, there may be requirements to get the data from them. Sometimes there may be a need to get data from multiple Locally stored HTML files too. Usually HTML files got the tags like <h1>, <h2>,…<p>, <div> tags etc., Using BeautifulSoup, we can scrap the contents and get the necessary details.
Installation
It can be installed by typing the below command in the terminal.
pip install beautifulsoup4
Getting Started
If there is an HTML file stored in one location, and we need to scrap the content via Python using BeautifulSoup, the lxml is a great API as it meant for parsing XML and HTML. It supports both one-step parsing and step-by-step parsing.
The Prettify() function in BeautifulSoup helps to view the tag nature and their nesting.
Example: Let’s create a sample HTML file.
Python3
# Necessary importsimport sysimport urllib.request # Save a reference to the original# standard outputoriginal_stdout = sys.stdout # as an example, taken my article list# published link page and stored in localwith urllib.request.urlopen('https://auth.geeksforgeeks.org/user/priyarajtt/articles') as webPageResponse: outputHtml = webPageResponse.read() # Scraped contents are placed in # samplehtml.html file and getting# used for next set of exampleswith open('samplehtml.html', 'w') as f: # Here the standard output is # written to the file that we # used above sys.stdout = f print(outputHtml) # Reset the standard output to its # original value sys.stdout = original_stdout |
Output:
Now, use prettify() method to view tags and content in an easier way.
Python3
# Importing BeautifulSoup and # it is in the bs4 modulefrom bs4 import BeautifulSoup # Opening the html file. If the file# is present in different location, # exact location need to be mentionedHTMLFileToBeOpened = open("samplehtml.html", "r") # Reading the file and storing in a variablecontents = HTMLFileToBeOpened.read() # Creating a BeautifulSoup object and# specifying the parser beautifulSoupText = BeautifulSoup(contents, 'lxml') # Using the prettify method to modify the code# Prettify() function in BeautifulSoup helps# to view about the tag nature and their nestingprint(beautifulSoupText.body.prettify()) |
Output :
In this way can get HTML data. Now do some operations and some insightful in the data.
Example 1:
We can use find() methods and as HTML contents dynamically change, we may not be knowing the exact tag name. In that time, we can use findAll(True) to get the tag name first, and then we can do any kind of manipulation. For example, get the tag name and length of the tag
Python3
# Importing BeautifulSoup and it# is in the bs4 modulefrom bs4 import BeautifulSoup # Opening the html file. If the file# is present in different location, # exact location need to be mentionedHTMLFileToBeOpened = open("samplehtml.html", "r") # Reading the file and storing in a variablecontents = HTMLFileToBeOpened.read() # Creating a BeautifulSoup object and # specifying the parserbeautifulSoupText = BeautifulSoup(contents, 'lxml') # To get all the tags present in the html # and getting their lengthfor tag in beautifulSoupText.findAll(True): print(tag.name, " : ", len(beautifulSoupText.find(tag.name).text)) |
Output:
Example 2 :
Now, instead of scraping one HTML file, we want to do for all the HTML files present in that directory(there may be necessities for such cases as on daily basis, a particular directory may get filled with the online data and as a batch process, scraping has to be carried out).
We can use “os” module functionalities. Let us take the current directory all HTML files for our examples
So our task is to get all HTML files to get scrapped. In the below way, we can achieve. Entire folder HTML files got scraped one by one and their length of tags for all files are retrieved, and it is showcased in the attached video.
Python3
# necessary import for getting# directory and filenamesimport osfrom bs4 import BeautifulSoup # Get current working directorydirectory = os.getcwd() # for all the files present in that# directoryfor filename in os.listdir(directory): # check whether the file is having # the extension as html and it can # be done with endswith function if filename.endswith('.html'): # os.path.join() method in Python join # one or more path components which helps # to exactly get the file fname = os.path.join(directory, filename) print("Current file name ..", os.path.abspath(fname)) # open the file with open(fname, 'r') as file: beautifulSoupText = BeautifulSoup(file.read(), 'html.parser') # parse the html as you wish for tag in beautifulSoupText.findAll(True): print(tag.name, " : ", len(beautifulSoupText.find(tag.name).text)) |
Output:
