Parse HTML table to Python list?

Question

I'd like to take an HTML table and parse through it to get a list of dictionaries. Each list element would be a dictionary corresponding to a row in the table.

If, for example, I had an HTML table with three columns (marked by header tags), "Event", "Start Date", and "End Date" and that table had 5 entries, I would like to parse through that table to get back a list of length 5 where each element is a dictionary with keys "Event", "Start Date", and "End Date".

Thanks for the help!

Answer 1

You should use some HTML parsing library like lxml:

from lxml import etree
s = """<table>
  <tr><th>Event</th><th>Start Date</th><th>End Date</th></tr>
  <tr><td>a</td><td>b</td><td>c</td></tr>
  <tr><td>d</td><td>e</td><td>f</td></tr>
  <tr><td>g</td><td>h</td><td>i</td></tr>
</table>
"""
table = etree.HTML(s).find("body/table")
rows = iter(table)
headers = [col.text for col in next(rows)]
for row in rows:
    values = [col.text for col in row]
    print dict(zip(headers, values))

prints

{'End Date': 'c', 'Start Date': 'b', 'Event': 'a'}
{'End Date': 'f', 'Start Date': 'e', 'Event': 'd'}
{'End Date': 'i', 'Start Date': 'h', 'Event': 'g'}