How can I extract data from a html tag using Python?

Question

I want to extract the translation of a word in online dictionary. For example, the html code for 'car':

<ol class="sense_list level_1">
     <li class="sense_list_item level_1" value="1"><span class="def">any vehicle on wheels</span></li>

How can I extract "any vehicle on wheels" in Python with beautifulsoup or any other modules?

thanks for all answers. but that html code has other lines similar to above line with only one difference: value="1" .for each line value changes. how can i extract line with value="1" — Sara Santana
– Sara Santana, Commented Mar 24, 2015 at 17:49
Seems like a duplicate of stackoverflow.com/questions/328356/… — alexander.biskop
– alexander.biskop, Commented Mar 24, 2015 at 18:14
I have modified my answer to include start tag and attributes. — ILostMySpoon
– ILostMySpoon, Commented Mar 24, 2015 at 18:32
@SaraSantana updated the answer - the last option checks for the value attribute value. — alecxe
– alecxe, Commented Mar 24, 2015 at 20:03

Sara Santana · Accepted Answer · 2015-03-24 18:33:20Z

1

I solve it by beautifulsoup:

soup = bs4.BeautifulSoup(html)
q1=soup.find('li', class_="sense_list_item level_1",value='1').text

answered Mar 24, 2015 at 18:33

Sara Santana

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Comments

alecxe · Accepted Answer · 2015-03-24 20:03:10Z

1

There are multiple ways to reach the desired element.

Probably the simplest would be to find it by class:

soup.find('span', class_='def').text

or, with a CSS selector:

soup.select('span.def')[0].text

or, additionally checking the parents:

soup.select('ol.level_1 > li.level_1 > span.def')[0].text

or:

soup.select('ol.level_1 > li[value=1] > span.def')[0].text

answered Mar 24, 2015 at 17:29

alecxe

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FTA · Accepted Answer · 2015-03-24 17:32:12Z

0

Assuming that is the only HTML code given, you can use NLTK.

import nltk 

#load html chunk into variable htmlstring#
extract = nltk.clean_html(htmlstring)
print(extract)

answered Mar 24, 2015 at 17:32

FTA

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