wrapping html with a python function

Question

I want to be able to wrap a div based on it's id. For example given the following HTML:

<body>
    <div id="info">
        <div id="a1">
        </div>
        <div id="a2">
            <div id="description">
            </div>
            <div id="links">
                <a href="http://example.com">link</a>
            </div>
        </div>
    </div>
</body>

I want to write a Python function that takes a document, an id, and a selector. and will wrap the given id in the given document in a div with the class or id selector. For example, lets say that the HTML above is in a variable doc

wrap(doc,'#a2','#wrapped')

will return the following HTML:

<body>
    <div id="info">
        <div id="a1">
        </div>
        <div id="wrapped">
            <div id="a2">
                <div id="description">
                </div>
                <div id="links">
                    <a href="http://example.com">link</a>
                </div>
            </div>
        </div>
    </div>
</body>

I looked at some XML parsers and Python HTMLParser, but I have not found anything that gives me the capability to not only get everything inside a specific tag, but then be able to append strings and easily edit the document. If one does not exist, what would be a good approach to this?

I would rather not use BeautifulSoup for this as it is just for one quick thing in a module I am writing and I don't want to have to import something of that magnitude, and i am not even sure how to go about this in beautifulSoup, but I will check it out if there really is no other way

zhangyangyu · Answer 1 · 2013-07-10 07:53:48Z

I recommend BeautifulSoup though it will bring some dependency but also a lot convenience. The following code can acheieve the goal of the wrap:

    from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
    data = '''<body>
                <div id="info">
                  <div id="a1">
                  </div>
                  <div id="a2">
                    <div id="description">
                    </div>
                    <div id="links">
                      <a href="http://example.com">link</a>
                    </div>
                  </div>
                </div>
              </body>'''
    soup = BeautifulSoup(data)
    div = soup.find('div', attrs={'id': 'a2'})
    div.wrap(soup.new_tag('div', id='wrapper'))

And then print soup.prettify() we can see the result:

<html>
 <body>
  <div id="info">
   <div id="a1">
   </div>
   <div id="wrapper">
    <div id="a2">
     <div id="description">
     </div>
     <div id="links">
      <a href="http://example.com">
       link
      </a>
     </div>
    </div>
   </div>
  </div>
 </body>
</html>

Sudipta · Answer 2 · 2013-07-10 09:27:45Z

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup

#div1 is to be wrapped with div2
def wrap(doc,div1_id,div2_id)
    pool = BeautifulSoup(doc)
    for div in pool.findAll('div', attrs={'id':div1_id}):
        div.replaceWith('<div id='+div2_id+'>' + div.prettify() + '</div>' )
    return pool.prettify()

wrap(doc,'a2','wrapped')

asked	today
viewed	42 times
active	today

wrapping html with a python function

2 Answers

Your Answer

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged python html parsing or ask your own question.

wrapping html with a python function

2 Answers

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Post as a guest

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged python html parsing or ask your own question.

Related