How to convert an HTML table to an array in python

Question

I have an html document, and I want to pull the tables out of this document and return them as arrays. I\'m picturing 2 functions, one that finds all the html tables in a d

Answer 1

Use BeautifulSoup (I recommend 3.0.8). Finding all tables is trivial:

import BeautifulSoup

def get_tables(htmldoc):
    soup = BeautifulSoup.BeautifulSoup(htmldoc)
    return soup.findAll('table')

However, in Python, an array is 1-dimensional and constrained to pretty elementary types as items (integers, floats, that elementary). So there's no way to squeeze an HTML table in a Python array.

Maybe you mean a Python list instead? That's also 1-dimensional, but anything can be an item, so you could have a list of lists (one sublist per tr tag, I imagine, containing one item per td tag).

That would give:

def makelist(table):
  result = []
  allrows = table.findAll('tr')
  for row in allrows:
    result.append([])
    allcols = row.findAll('td')
    for col in allcols:
      thestrings = [unicode(s) for s in col.findAll(text=True)]
      thetext = ''.join(thestrings)
      result[-1].append(thetext)
  return result

This may not yet be quite what you want (doesn't skip HTML comments, the items of the sublists are unicode strings and not byte strings, etc) but it should be easy to adjust.