extract HTML table in a structured format

[Jabba Laci]

Hi,

Thanks, it's a great idea to parse the wiki source. Since then I have found
a command for this particular task called "ubuntu-support-status" that
shows what I need.

But the idea to extract an HTML table from a webpage in a structured format
could be an interesting (and useful) project idea.

Best,

Laszlo


On Wed, Apr 10, 2013 at 8:11 PM, Arnaud Delobelle <arnodel at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 10 April 2013 09:44, Jabba Laci <jabba.laci at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I wonder if there is a nice way to extract a whole HTML table and have
> the
> > result in a nice structured format. What I want is to have the lifetime
> > table at the bottom of this page:
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ubuntu_releases (then figure out
> with a
> > script until when my Ubuntu release is supported).
> >
> > I could do it with BeautifulSoup or lxml but is there a better way? There
> > should be :)
>
> Instead of parsing HTML, you could just parse the source of the page
> (available via action=raw):
>
> ------------------------------
> import urllib2
>
> url = (
>         'http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php'
>         '?title=List_of_Ubuntu_releases&action=raw'
> )
>
> source = urllib2.urlopen(url).read()
>
> # Table rows are separated with the line "|-"
> # Then there is a line starting with "|"
> potential_rows = source.split("\n|-\n|")
>
> rows = []
>
> for row in potential_rows:
>         # Rows in the table start with a link (' [[ ... ]]')
>         if row.startswith(" [["):
>                 row = [item.strip() for item in row.split("\n|")]
>                 rows.append(row)
> ------------------------------
>
> >>> import pprint
> >>> pprint.pprint(rows)
> [['[[Warty Warthog|4.10]]',
>   'Warty Warthog',
>   '20 October 2004',
>   'colspan="2" {{Version |o |30 April 2006}}',
>   '2.6.8'],
>  ['[[Hoary Hedgehog|5.04]]',
>   'Hoary Hedgehog',
>   '8 April 2005',
>   'colspan="2" {{Version |o |31 October 2006}}',
>   '2.6.10'],
>  ['[[Breezy Badger|5.10]]',
>   'Breezy Badger',
>   '13 October 2005',
>   'colspan="2" {{Version |o |13 April 2007}}',
>   '2.6.12'],
>  ['[[Ubuntu 6.06|6.06 LTS]]',
>   'Dapper Drake',
>   '1 June 2006',
>   '{{Version |o | 14 July 2009}}',
>   '{{Version |o | 1 June 2011}}',
>   '2.6.15'],
>  ['[[Ubuntu 6.10|6.10]]',
>   'Edgy Eft',
>   '26 October 2006',
>   'colspan="2" {{Version |o | 25 April 2008}}',
>   '2.6.17'],
>   [...]
> ]
> >>>
>
> That should give you the info you need (until the wiki page changes too
> much!)
>
> --
> Arnaud
>
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