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SGMLParser doesn't produce anything by itself. It parses and parses and parses, and it calls a method for each interesting thing it finds, but the methods don't do anything. SGMLParser is an HTML consumer: it takes HTML and breaks it down into small, structured pieces. As you saw in the previous section, you can subclass SGMLParser to define classes that catch specific tags and produce useful things, like a list of all the links on a web page. Now you'll take this one step further by defining a class that catches everything SGMLParser throws at it and reconstructs the complete HTML document. In technical terms, this class will be an HTML producer.
BaseHTMLProcessor subclasses SGMLParser and provides all 8 essential handler methods: unknown_starttag, unknown_endtag, handle_charref, handle_entityref, handle_comment, handle_pi, handle_decl, and handle_data.
class BaseHTMLProcessor(SGMLParser): def reset(self): self.pieces = [] SGMLParser.reset(self) def unknown_starttag(self, tag, attrs): strattrs = "".join([' %s="%s"' % (key, value) for key, value in attrs]) self.pieces.append("<%(tag)s%(strattrs)s>" % locals()) def unknown_endtag(self, tag): self.pieces.append("</%(tag)s>" % locals()) def handle_charref(self, ref): self.pieces.append("%(ref)s;" % locals()) def handle_entityref(self, ref): self.pieces.append("&%(ref)s" % locals()) if htmlentitydefs.entitydefs.has_key(ref): self.pieces.append(";") def handle_data(self, text): self.pieces.append(text) def handle_comment(self, text): self.pieces.append("<!--%(text)s-->" % locals()) def handle_pi(self, text): self.pieces.append("<?%(text)s>" % locals()) def handle_decl(self, text): self.pieces.append("<!%(text)s>" % locals())
reset, called by SGMLParser.__init__, initializes self.pieces as an empty list before calling the ancestor method. self.pieces is a data attribute which will hold the pieces of the HTML document you're constructing. Each handler method will reconstruct the HTML that SGMLParser parsed, and each method will append that string to self.pieces. Note that self.pieces is a list. You might be tempted to define it as a string and just keep appending each piece to it. That would work, but Python is much more efficient at dealing with lists.[2] | |
Since BaseHTMLProcessor does not define any methods for specific tags (like the start_a method in URLLister), SGMLParser will call unknown_starttag for every start tag. This method takes the tag (tag) and the list of attribute name/value pairs (attrs), reconstructs the original HTML, and appends it to self.pieces. The string formatting here is a little strange; you'll untangle that (and also the odd-looking locals function) later in this chapter. | |
Reconstructing end tags is much simpler; just take the tag name and wrap it in the </...> brackets. | |
When SGMLParser finds a character reference, it calls handle_charref with the bare reference. If the HTML document contains the reference , ref will be 160. Reconstructing the original complete character reference just involves wrapping ref in ...; characters. | |
Entity references are similar to character references, but without the hash mark. Reconstructing the original entity reference requires wrapping ref in &...; characters. (Actually, as an erudite reader pointed out to me, it's slightly more complicated than this. Only certain standard HTML entites end in a semicolon; other similar-looking entities do not. Luckily for us, the set of standard HTML entities is defined in a dictionary in a Python module called htmlentitydefs. Hence the extra if statement.) | |
Blocks of text are simply appended to self.pieces unaltered. | |
HTML comments are wrapped in <!--...--> characters. | |
Processing instructions are wrapped in <?...> characters. |
The HTML specification requires that all non-HTML (like client-side JavaScript) must be enclosed in HTML comments, but not all web pages do this properly (and all modern web browsers are forgiving if they don't). BaseHTMLProcessor is not forgiving; if script is improperly embedded, it will be parsed as if it were HTML. For instance, if the script contains less-than and equals signs, SGMLParser may incorrectly think that it has found tags and attributes. SGMLParser always converts tags and attribute names to lowercase, which may break the script, and BaseHTMLProcessor always encloses attribute values in double quotes (even if the original HTML document used single quotes or no quotes), which will certainly break the script. Always protect your client-side script within HTML comments. |
def output(self): """Return processed HTML as a single string""" return "".join(self.pieces)
[2] The reason Python is better at lists than strings is that lists are mutable but strings are immutable. This means that appending to a list just adds the element and updates the index. Since strings can not be changed after they are created, code like s = s + newpiece will create an entirely new string out of the concatenation of the original and the new piece, then throw away the original string. This involves a lot of expensive memory management, and the amount of effort involved increases as the string gets longer, so doing s = s + newpiece in a loop is deadly. In technical terms, appending n items to a list is O(n), while appending n items to a string is O(n2).
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