error with parse function in lxml

Question

i have installed lxml2.2.2 on windows platform(i m using python version 2.6.5).i tried this simple command:

from lxml.html import parse 
p= parse(‘http://ww         


        

Answer 1

According to the api docs it should work: http://lxml.de/api/lxml.html-module.html#parse

This seems to be a bug in lxml 2.2.2. I just tested on windows with python 2.6 and 2.7 and it does work with 2.3.0.

So: upgrade your lxml and you'll be fine.

I don't know exactly in which versions of lxml the problem occurs, but I believe the problem was not so much with lxml itself, but with the version of libxml2 used to build the windows binary. (certain versions of libxml2 had a problem with http on windows)

Answer 2

lxml.html.parse does not fetch URLs.

Here's how to do it with urllib2:

>>> from urllib2 import urlopen
>>> from lxml.html import parse
>>> page = urlopen('http://www.google.com')
>>> p = parse(page)
>>> p.getroot()
<Element html at 1304050>

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Update
Steven is right. lxml.etree.parse should accept and load URLs. I missed that. I've tried deleting this answer, but I'm not allowed.

I retract my statement about it not fetching URLs.

Answer 3

Since line breaks are not allowed in comments, here's my implementation of MattH's answer:

from urllib2 import urlopen
from lxml.html import parse

site_url = ('http://www.google.com')

try:
    page = parse(site_url).getroot()
except IOError:
    page = parse(urlopen(site_url)).getroot()