collective.soupstrainer 1.0

Clean up HTML using BeautifulSoup and filter rules.

collective.soupstrainer

Quite often there is a need to clean up HTML from some source, be it user input or data gathered by scraping, which needs to be cleaned up. With the SoupStrainer class in collective.soupstrainer this is made easy. It uses BeautifulSoup to parse and clean up HTML. The constructor of the class takes three arguments.

exclusions This is a list of tuples with two items each. The first item is a list of tag names, the second item is a list of attributes. If the list of attributes is empty, then each tag in the first list is completely removed from the passed in HTML. If the list of tags is empty, then each attribute listed is completely removed. If there are both tags and attributes listed, then the attributes are only removed from matching tags.

style_whitelist This is a white list of CSS styles allowed in 'style' attributes. All other styles are removed.

class_blacklist This is a black list for CSS classes. Each matching class is removed from 'class' attributes.

An instance of the SoupStrainer class can be called directly with one argument. The argument can either be a string, in which case it will internally be parsed by BeautifulSoup and the result will be unicode, or it can be a parsed HTML tree created by BeautifulSoup, in which case it will be modified in place and be returned again.

Changelog