Parsing HTML using Python

Question

I\'m looking for an HTML Parser module for Python that can help me get the tags in the form of Python lists/dictionaries/objects.

If I have a document of the form:

Answer 1

Here you can read more about different HTML parsers in Python and their performance. Even though the article is a bit dated it still gives you a good overview.

Python HTML parser performance

I'd recommend BeautifulSoup even though it isn't built in. Just because it's so easy to work with for those kinds of tasks. Eg:

import urllib2
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup

page = urllib2.urlopen('http://www.google.com/')
soup = BeautifulSoup(page)

x = soup.body.find('div', attrs={'class' : 'container'}).text