Parsing SGML document in Python program

[Ilya Shambat]

Eric Brunel <eric.brunel at pragmadev.com> wrote in message news:<aojvaj$348$1 at news-reader10.wanadoo.fr>...
> Ilya Shambat wrote:
> 
> > Hello all,
> > 
> > I need to be able to parse an SGML document in a Python program. I
> > need to know the syntax on how to do that. The project involves using
> > a DTD, passed as a command line argument, to read all the SGML files
> > that exist in a directory. Does anybody know how this is done?
> 
> There is a sgmllib module in the standard library, but it's not a full SGML 
> parser. SGML has a lot of funky possibilities that are quite hard to parse 
> and that were apparently not considered in the sgmllib module. I never used 
> it, but as far as I can see from the docs, it doesn't use a DTD, so it's 
> really not a SGML parser (XML seems to live well without a DTD, but doing 
> so in SGML may be considered as heretic ;-). It may however be usable if 
> your documents are really simple.
> 
> I had once to do that and I couldn't find a parser directly usable in 
> Python. Maybe it has changed (just check the Vaults of Parnassus for it). 
> The solution I used at the time was to rely on an external parser that gave 
> easy to parse results. The one I used was nsgmls, part of James Clark's SP 
> project. You may find it @ http://www.jclark.com/sp/ ; just test it and 
> you'll see that its output is really easy to get back into Python.

I have looked at the documentation for nsgmls, and I found it rather
inadequate. Is it possible for anyone to post an example of how this
is done? Any help on this would be greatly appreciated.