What is this?

This is a simple wrapper around lxml, which adds some nice features, which make work with lxml better. This library covers all my needs in html parsing.

Dependencies

lxml obviously :3

Features

• Nice jquery-like css selectors
• Simple access to element attributes
• Easy way for convert html to other format (bbcode, markdown, etc)
• Few nice functions for work with text
• And, of course this saves all original features of lxml

Description

Main function of module (as I mind) is leaf.parse, this function takes string with html as an argument, and returns leaf.Parser object, which wraps lxml object. With this object you can do anything you want, like this:

document = leaf.parse(sample)
links = document('div#menu a') # get links in div with id menu through css selectors

Or you can do this:

link = document.get('div#menu a') # get first link or return None

And you can get attributes from these results like this:

print link.onclick

Anyway, you can use standard lxml methods like object.xpath, and they returns results wrapped into leaf.Parser. So, my favorite feature is parsing html into bbcode (markdown, etc):

# Lets define simple formatter, which pass text
# and wraps links into [url][/url] (like bbcode)
def omgcode_formatter(element, childrens):
        # Replace <br> tag with line break
    if element.tag == 'br':
        return '\n'
        # Wrap links into [url][/url]
    if element.tag == 'a':
        return u"[url=link}]{text}[/url]".format(link=element.href, text=childrens)
        # Return childrens only for other elements.
    if childrens:
        return childrens

This function will be recursively called with element and childrens (this is string with childrens parsing result). So, lets call this parser in some leaf.Parser object:

document.parse(omgcode_formatter)

More detailed examples availible in the tests.

Finally, this library has some nice functions for work with text:

to_unicode -- Convert string to unicode string

strip_accents -- Strip accents from a string

strip_symbols -- Strip ugly unicode symbols from a string

strip_spaces -- Strip excess spaces from a string

strip_linebreaks -- Strip excess line breaks from a string