Parsing HTML/XML documents

[Stefan Behnel]

pabloski at giochinternet.com wrote:
> I need to parse real world HTML/XML documents and I found two nice python
> solution: BeautifulSoup and Tidy.

There's also lxml, in case you want a real XML tool.
http://codespeak.net/lxml/
http://codespeak.net/lxml/dev/parsing.html#parsers


> However I found pyXPCOM that is a wrapper for Gecko. So I was thinking
> Gecko surely handles bad html in a more consistent and error-proof way
> than BS and Tidy.
> 
> I'm interested in using Mozilla DOM from inside a Python script, however
> I'm a bit confused about how can I use pyXPCOM to accomplish this job.

I've never used it, but I doubt Gecko would yield substantially better results
than any of the three above. You're dealing with broken data here, so it just
depends on your input which one of them wins.

Stefan