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html5lib is a pure-python library for parsing HTML. It is designed toconform to the WHATWG HTML specification, as is implemented by all majorweb browsers.

Simple usage follows this pattern:

importhtml5libwithopen("mydocument.html","rb")asf:document=html5lib.parse(f)

or:

importhtml5libdocument=html5lib.parse("<p>Hello World!")

By default, thedocument will be anxml.etree element instance.Whenever possible, html5lib chooses the acceleratedElementTreeimplementation (i.e.xml.etree.cElementTree on Python 2.x).

Two other tree types are supported:xml.dom.minidom andlxml.etree. To use an alternative format, specify the name ofa treebuilder:

importhtml5libwithopen("mydocument.html","rb")asf:lxml_etree_document=html5lib.parse(f,treebuilder="lxml")

When using withurllib2 (Python 2), the charset from HTTP should bepass into html5lib as follows:

fromcontextlibimportclosingfromurllib2importurlopenimporthtml5libwithclosing(urlopen("http://example.com/"))asf:document=html5lib.parse(f,transport_encoding=f.info().getparam("charset"))

When using withurllib.request (Python 3), the charset from HTTPshould be pass into html5lib as follows:

fromurllib.requestimporturlopenimporthtml5libwithurlopen("http://example.com/")asf:document=html5lib.parse(f,transport_encoding=f.info().get_content_charset())

To have more control over the parser, create a parser object explicitly.For instance, to make the parser raise exceptions on parse errors, use:

importhtml5libwithopen("mydocument.html","rb")asf:parser=html5lib.HTMLParser(strict=True)document=parser.parse(f)

When you're instantiating parser objects explicitly, pass a treebuilderclass as thetree keyword argument to use an alternative documentformat:

importhtml5libparser=html5lib.HTMLParser(tree=html5lib.getTreeBuilder("dom"))minidom_document=parser.parse("<p>Hello World!")

More documentation is available athttps://html5lib.readthedocs.io/.

html5lib works on CPython 2.6+, CPython 3.3+ and PyPy. To install it,use:

$ pip install html5lib

The following third-party libraries may be used for additionalfunctionality:

• datrie can be used under CPython to improve parsing performance(though in almost all cases the improvement is marginal);
• lxml is supported as a tree format (for both building andwalking) under CPython (butnot PyPy where it is known to causesegfaults);
• genshi has a treewalker (but not builder); and
• chardet can be used as a fallback when character encoding cannotbe determined.

Please report any bugs on theissue tracker.

Unit tests require thepytest andmock libraries and can berun using thepy.test command in the root directory;ordereddict is required under Python 2.6. All should pass.

Test data are contained in a separatehtml5lib-tests repository and includedas a submodule, thus for git checkouts they must be initialized:

$ git submodule init$ git submodule update

If you have all compatible Python implementations available on yoursystem, you can run tests on all of them using thetox utility,which can be found on PyPI.

There's a mailing list available for support on Google Groups,html5lib-discuss,though you may get a quicker response asking on IRC in#whatwg onirc.freenode.net.