New Case Study:See how Anthropic automated 95% of dependency reviews with Socket.Learn More →

hext

Package Overview

Dependencies

Advanced tools

Install Socket

Detect and block malicious and high-risk dependencies

Install

hext

A module and command-line utility to extract structured data from HTML

1.0.12
PyPI

Maintainers: 1

Hext — Extract Data from HTML

Hext is a domain-specific language for extracting structured data from HTML. It can be thought of as a counterpart to templates, which are typically used by web developers to structure content on the web.

A Quick Example

The following Hext template collects all hyperlinks and extracts the href and the clickable text.

<a href:link @text:title />

Hext does so by recursively trying to match every HTML element. In the case above, an element is required to have the tag a and an attribute called href. If the element matches, its attribute href and its textual representation are stored as link and title, respectively.

If the above Hext template is applied to this piece of HTML:

<body>
  <a href="one.html">  Page 1</a>
  <a href="two.html">  Page 2</a>
  <a href="three.html">Page 3</a>
</body>

Hext will produce the following values:

{ "link": "one.html",   "title": "Page 1" },
{ "link": "two.html",   "title": "Page 2" },
{ "link": "three.html", "title": "Page 3" }

You can use this example in Hext’s live code editor. Visit Hext’s documentation and its section “How Hext Matches Elements” for a more thorough explanation.

Components

This package includes:

The Hext Python module
The htmlext command-line utility

Using Hext with Python

The module exposes three interfaces:

html = hext.Html("<html>...</html>") -> object
rule = hext.Rule("...") -> object
rule.extract(html) -> dictionary of {string -> string}
rule.extract has a second optional parameter max_searches which is of type unsigned int. The search for matching elements is aborted after this limit is reached. The default is 0, which never aborts.

import hext
import requests
import json

res = requests.get('https://news.ycombinator.com/')
res.raise_for_status()

# hext.Html's constructor expects a single argument
# containing an UTF-8 encoded string of HTML.
html = hext.Html(res.text)

# hext.Rule's constructor expects a single argument
# containing a Hext template.
# Throws an exception of type ValueError on invalid syntax.
rule = hext.Rule("""
<tr>
  <td><span @text:rank /></td>
  <td><a href:href @text:title /></td>
</tr>
<?tr>
  <td>
    <span @text:score />
    <a @text:user />
    <a:last-child @text:filter(/\d+/):comment_count />
  </td>
</tr>""")

# hext.Rule.extract expects an argument of type hext.Html.
# Returns a list of dictionaries.
result = rule.extract(html)

# Print each dictionary as JSON
for map in result:
    print(json.dumps(map, ensure_ascii=False,
                          separators=(',',':')))

Using Hext on the Command Line

Hext ships with a command line utility called htmlext, which applies Hext templates to HTML documents and outputs JSON.

htmlext - Extract structured content from HTML.

Usage:
  htmlext [options] <hext-file> <html-file...>
      Apply extraction rules from <hext-file> to each
      <html-file> and print the captured content as JSON.

Options:
  -x [ --hext ] <file>  Add Hext from file
  -i [ --html ] <file>  Add HTML from file
  -s [ --str ] <string> Add Hext from string
  -c [ --compact ]      Print one JSON object per line
  -p [ --pretty ]       Pretty-print JSON
  -a [ --array ]        Wrap results in a JSON array
  -f [ --filter ] <key> Print values whose name matches <key>
  -l [ --lint ]         Do Hext syntax check
  -h [ --help ]         Print this help message
  -V [ --version ]      Print info and version

Ever wanted to watch the submissions on /r/videos in vlc? Well, take a look at this little guy right here:

htmlext \
  -i <(wget -O- -o/dev/null "https://old.reddit.com/r/videos/") \
  -s '<a class="title" href:x />' \
  -f x \
  | xargs vlc

License

Hext is released under the terms of the Apache License v2.0. The source code is hosted on Github. This binary package includes content authored by third parties:

rapidjson. Copyright (C) 2015 THL A29 Limited, a Tencent company, and Milo Yip. See rapidjson.license.

Keywords

html-extraction scraping html data-extraction

FAQs

What is hext?

Is hext well maintained?

Did you know?

Socket for GitHub automatically highlights issues in each pull request and monitors the health of all your open source dependencies. Discover the contents of your packages and block harmful activity before you install or update your dependencies.

Install

hext

Hext — Extract Data from HTML

A Quick Example

Components

Using Hext with Python

Using Hext on the Command Line

License

Keywords

Related posts

Create React App Officially Deprecated Amid React 19 Compatibility Issues

Oracle Drags Its Feet in the JavaScript Trademark Dispute