Using HP ALM REST API, we get the Memo fields embedded with HTML tags such as <html>, <span>, <body>, etc. Is there a way to suppress the same using any options?
Using the earlier OTA API, we had the option to use tdconnection.IgnoreHtmlFormat=True, which used to suppress these tags, but using REST API, I am unable to find an equivalent one. Any suggestions or should I build a parser myself after reading the output?
I personally don't know of a switch like that.
Alternatively you might try this:
How to Parse Only Text from HTML
On paper this seems quite nice.
This requires an extra step though. After getting the request you'ld have to run it through the proposed library to get the get the flat text. Shouldn't be more than a line of code I think.
Downside is there might be some stuff going south because you dump any formatting stored as HTML. Usually that isn't much though. Depends of the project and the people off course.
Related
I have a project where my input files used to be XML. I'm now being asked to start processing HTML with embedded CSS instead, and I'd like to accomplish this as cleanly and with as few code changes as possible. I was using XML::LibXML to parse the XML files, but now that we're moving to HTML with CSS, I'm thinking I'll need to move to something else. That said, before I dig myself knee deep into silly decisions I'll likely regret, I wanted to ask here: what do you guys use for this kind of task?
The structures of the old XML and the new HTML input files are pretty similar, with both holding the same information. The HTML uses divs in place of the XML's text nodes, and holds its style information in style tags and attributes instead of separated xml attributes.
An example of the old XML is:
<text font="TimesNewRoman,BoldItalic" size="11.04" x="59" y="405" w="52"
h="12" bold="yes" italic="yes" cs="4.6" o_bbox="59,405;52,12"
o_size="11.04" o_cs="4.6">
Some text
</text>
An example of the new HTML is:
<div o="9ka" style="position:absolute;top:145;left:89;x-pdf-top:744;x-pdf-left:60;x-pdf-bottom:732;x-pdf-right:536;">
<span class="ft19" >
Some text
</span></nobr>
</div>
where "ft19" refers to a css style element from the top of the page of the format:
.ft19{ vertical-align:top;font-size:14px;x-pdf-font-size:14px;
font-family:Times;color:#000000;x-pdf-color:#000000;font-style:italic;
x-pdf-letter-spacing:0.83px;}
Basically, all I want is a parser that can read the stylistic elements of each node as attributes, so I could do something like:
my #texts_arr = $page_node->findnodes('text');
my $test_node = $texts_arr[1];
print "node\'s bold value is: " . $text_node->getAttribute('bold');
as I'm able to do with the XML. Does anything like that exist for parsing HTML? I'd really like to make sure I start this the right way instead of finding something that sort of does what I want on CPAN and realizing two months later that there was another module that was way better for what I'm trying to do.
Ideas?
The basic one I am aware of is HTML::Parser.
There is also a project that works with it, Marpa::HTML which is the work of the larger parser project Marpa, which parses any language that can be described in BNF, documented on the author's blog which is very interesting but much newer and experimental.
I also see that wildly successful WWW::Mechanize uses HTML::TokeParser, and it uses HTML::PullParser, so there's that too.
If you need something even more generic (and evil) you can look into "writing" your own using something like Text::Balanced (which has some nice methods for tags, not sure about tag properties though) or even Regexp::Grammars, but again this means reinventing the wheel somewhat, I would only choose these routes if the above don't do what you need.
Perhaps I haven't helped. Perhaps I have just done a literature search for you, but maybe one of these will work better for you than others.
Edit: one more parser for you, seems like it might do what you need HTML::Tree. Then look at methods like look_down from HTML::Element to act on the tree. I saw an example here.
It's not clear - is the Perl parsing for the purposes of doing the conversion to HTML (with embedded CSS)? If so, why not forget Perl and use XSLT which is designed to transform XML documents?
I'll ask my question first, then give some background for those who are interested:
I would like to know if there is a command in html that will automatically generate a bibliography from a .bib file? This means that throughout the text, i would add something like <cite name="Jones2010">, and then at the bottom of the html (or css) file, I would write something like <makebib file="biblist.bib", format="APA">, and a bibliography would be generated using my .bib file, and formated according to the APA style. The functionality would be quite similar to footnotes, except that each footnote is populated according to some script that extracts the information from (essentially) an xml file and outputs the content in the desired format. It is not difficult to imagine somebody creating a tool to do just that, however, my google search skills have not enabled me to find such a tool. It is easy to find tools that convert bib files to html or xml, but that is not sufficient for my needs. I do not desire to publish my entire bib file online. Rather, for each document that I generate, I want several of the entries in the bib file to be included as footnotes. Any pointers will be greatly appreciated.
Now, the reason behind the question:
I have recently begun switching from writing all my manuscripts using latex to writing them using html/css. The advantages of this approach are fast: only 1 file for versioning (instead of .dvi, .ps, .aux, .blg, etc.), it is much smaller to share, other people can edit the html file and compile it much more easily, it is more configurable to my tastes, easier to read on screen, etc. The disadvantage for me, however, is that while I've been writing in latex for years, I've only just begin using html and css for scientific document creating. The main impetus for the switch was MathJaX, which enables me to to embed latex equations in my html files, and therefore, allows me to combine the advantages of latex with the advantages of css. I imagine that nearly all my colleagues will switch away from latex to this simpler format, assuming a few remaining issues get resolved, like ease of creating bibliographies.
Many thanks.
What you're asking isn't possible, unless when you specify html/css you really mean html/css/php or html/css/python or some other combination that includes an actual programming language, rather than just a markup language.
I understand your motivation, I'd love to switch to html instead of latex! However, I suspect an html-based solution would involve so much extra processing added on top to sort out bibliographies etc that the complexity would start approaching that of LaTeX by the time you got it all worked out.
I'd be pleased to be proven wrong on this!
I've done this, in the past, using XSLT and BibTeX. In outline, the steps are
Mark up your document using some convention or other: I used <span class='citation'>Smith99</span>
Write an XSLT script to transform that file into a .aux file with \citation commands in it
Use BibTeX along with a .bst file which spits out HTML rather than LaTeX
Use another XSLT script (or the same one, in a different mode) to pull the bibliography in
It's not quite as fiddly as it sounds, but you can look at how I did it on google code. In particular, see structure.xslt and plainhtml.bst.
If there's a more direct way, I'd be quite interested to hear about it.
Both answers so far are somewhat correct, although not quite what you were asking for. Part of the problem is that the question as it's phrased doesn't necessarily makes sense.
HTML is just markup; you need something to process the markup, be it python, php, ruby, etc.
And you probably want to write in XML (or XHTML), not HTML.
XSLT may work for you (once it's in XML), but remember, an XSLT document that defines a set of rules. You would get an XSLT engine to apply your XSLT rules against your XML document.
You can create an html bibliography from a .bib file using bibtex2html. This package takes a series of command line arguments and extracts the info from the BibTeX source and outputs a file with html markup.
As far as I know you cannot get it to read and parse the html document like the LaTeX \cite command but there are several ways to indicate the references you want. I find that the easiest way is to just maintain a text file of the BibTeX keys I use in my manuscript and then call this using the --citefile option. There is also a tool called bib2bib included that will take search commands.
It is a very flexible package and there are a lot of options so it works in a lot of situations. For example you can get it to omit the <html> headers from the output file so that you can directly paste into an existing html document.
The documentation is useful but make sure you look at the pdf documentation file and the man pages.
I would like to parse a html page and extract the meaningful text from it. Anyone knows some good algorithms to do this?
I develop my applications on Rails, but I think ruby is a bit slow in this, so I think if exists some good library in c for this it would be appropriate.
Thanks!!
PD: Please do not recommend anything with java
UPDATE:
I found this link text
Sadly, is in python
Use Nokogiri, which is fast and written in C, for Ruby.
(Using regexp to parse recursive expressions like HTML is notoriously difficult and error prone and I would not go down that path. I only mention this in the answer as this issue seems to crop up again and again.)
With a real parser like for instance Nokogiri mentioned above, you also get the added benefit that the structure and logic of the HTML document is preserved, and sometimes you really need those clues.
Solutions integrating with Ruby
use Nokogiri as recommended by Amigable Clark kant
Use Hpricot
External Solutions
If your HTML is well-formed, you could use the Expat XML Parser for this.
For something more targeted toward HTML-only, the W3C actually released the code for the LibWWW, which contains a simple HTML parser (documentation).
Lynx is able to do this. This is open source if you want to take a look at it.
You should strip all angle-bracketed part from text and then collapse white-spaces.
In theory the < and > should not be there in other cases. Pages contain < and > everywhere instead of them.
Collapsing whitespaces: Convert all TAB, newline, etc to spaces, then replace every sequence of spaces to a single space.
UPDATE: And you should start after finding the <body> tag.
I have some html (in this case created via TinyMCE) that I would like to add to a page. However, for security reason, I don't want to just print everything the user has entered.
Does anyone know of a templatetag (a filter, preferably) that will allow only a safe subset of html to be rendered?
I realize that markdown and others do this. However, they also add additional markup syntax which could be confusing for my users, since they are using a rich text editor that doesn't know about markdown.
There's removetags, but it's a blacklisting approach which fails to remove tags when they don't look exactly like the well-formed tags Django expects, and of course since it doesn't attempt to remove attributes it is totally vulnerable to the 1,000 other ways of script-injection that don't involve the <script> tag. It's a trap, offering the illusion of safety whilst actually providing no real security at all.
HTML-sanitisation approaches based on regex hacking are almost inevitably a total fail. Using a real HTML parser to get an object model for the submitted content, then filtering and re-serialising in a known-good format, is generally the most reliable approach.
If your rich text editor outputs XHTML it's easy, just use minidom or etree to parse the document then walk over it removing all but known-good elements and attributes and finally convert back to safe XML. If, on the other hand, it spits out HTML, or allows the user to input raw HTML, you may need to use something like BeautifulSoup on it. See this question for some discussion.
Filtering HTML is a large and complicated topic, which is why many people prefer the text-with-restrictive-markup languages.
Use HTML Purifier, html5lib, or another library that is built to do HTML sanitization.
You can use removetags to specify list of tags to be remove:
{{ data|removetags:"script" }}
I have to parse a series of web pages in order to import data into an application. Each type of web page provides the same kind of data. The problem is that the HTML of each page is different, so the location of the data varies. Another problem is that the HTML code is poorly formatted, making it impossible to use a XML-like parser.
So far, the best strategy I can think of, is to define a template for each kind of page, like:
Template A:
<html>
...
<tr><td>Table column that is missing a td
<td> Another table column</td></tr>
<tr><td>$data_item_1$</td>
...
</html>
Template B:
<html>
...
<ul><li>Yet another poorly formatted page <li>$data_item_1$</td></tr>
...
</html>
This way I would only need one single parser for all the pages, that would compare each page with its template and retrieving the $data_item_1$, $data_item_2$, etc. Still, it is going to be a lot of work. Can you think of any simpler solution? Any library that can help?
Thanks
You can pass the page's source through tidy to get a valid page. You can find tidy here
. Tidy has bindings for a lot of programming languages. After you've done this, you can use your favorite parser/content extraction technique.
I'd recommend Html Agility Pack. It has the ability to work with poorly structured HTML while giving you Xml like selection using Xpath. You would still have to template items or select using different selections and analyze but it will get you past the poor structure hump.
As mentioned here and on other SO answers before, Beautiful Soup can parse weird HTML.
Beautiful Soup is a Python HTML/XML parser designed for quick turnaround projects like screen-scraping. Three features make it powerful:
Beautiful Soup won't choke if you give it bad markup. It yields a parse tree that makes approximately as much sense as your original document. This is usually good enough to collect the data you need and run away.
Beautiful Soup provides a few simple methods and Pythonic idioms for navigating, searching, and modifying a parse tree: a toolkit for dissecting a document and extracting what you need. You don't have to create a custom parser for each application.
Beautiful Soup automatically converts incoming documents to Unicode and outgoing documents to UTF-8. You don't have to think about encodings, unless the document doesn't specify an encoding and Beautiful Soup can't autodetect one. Then you just have to specify the original encoding.
Beautiful Soup parses anything you give it, and does the tree traversal stuff for you. You can tell it "Find all the links", or "Find all the links of class externalLink", or "Find all the links whose urls match "foo.com", or "Find the table heading that's got bold text, then give me that text."
Use HTML5 parser like html5lib.
Unlike HTML Tidy, this will give you error handling very close to what browsers do.
There's a couple C# specific threads on this, like Looking for C# HTML parser.
Depending on what data you need to extract regular expressions might be an option. I know a lot of people will shudder at the thought of using RegExes on structured data but the plain fact is (as you have discovered) that a lot of HTML isn't actually well structured and can be very hard to parse.
I had a similar problem to you, but in my case I only wanted one specific piece of data from the page which was easy to identify without parsing the HTML so a RegEx worked very nicely.