The moving parts
================
html5lib consists of a number of components, which are responsible for
handling its features.
Tree builders
-------------
The parser reads HTML by tokenizing the content and building a tree that
the user can later access. There are three main types of trees that
html5lib can build:
* ``etree`` - this is the default; builds a tree based on ``xml.etree``,
which can be found in the standard library. Whenever possible, the
accelerated ``ElementTree`` implementation (i.e.
``xml.etree.cElementTree`` on Python 2.x) is used.
* ``dom`` - builds a tree based on ``xml.dom.minidom``.
* ``lxml.etree`` - uses lxml's implementation of the ``ElementTree``
API. The performance gains are relatively small compared to using the
accelerated ``ElementTree`` module.
You can specify the builder by name when using the shorthand API:
.. code-block:: python
import html5lib
with open("mydocument.html", "rb") as f:
lxml_etree_document = html5lib.parse(f, treebuilder="lxml")
When instantiating a parser object, you have to pass a tree builder
class in the ``tree`` keyword attribute:
.. code-block:: python
import html5lib
parser = html5lib.HTMLParser(tree=SomeTreeBuilder)
document = parser.parse("Hello World!")
To get a builder class by name, use the ``getTreeBuilder`` function:
.. code-block:: python
import html5lib
parser = html5lib.HTMLParser(tree=html5lib.getTreeBuilder("dom"))
minidom_document = parser.parse("
Hello World!")
The implementation of builders can be found in `html5lib/treebuilders/
`_.
Tree walkers
------------
Once a tree is ready, you can work on it either manually, or using
a tree walker, which provides a streaming view of the tree. html5lib
provides walkers for all three supported types of trees (``etree``,
``dom`` and ``lxml``).
The implementation of walkers can be found in `html5lib/treewalkers/
`_.
Walkers make consuming HTML easier. html5lib uses them to provide you
with has a couple of handy tools.
HTMLSerializer
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The serializer lets you write HTML back as a stream of bytes.
.. code-block:: pycon
>>> import html5lib
>>> element = html5lib.parse('Witam wszystkich')
>>> walker = html5lib.getTreeWalker("etree")
>>> stream = walker(element)
>>> s = html5lib.serializer.HTMLSerializer()
>>> output = s.serialize(stream)
>>> for item in output:
... print("%r" % item)
''
'Witam wszystkich'
You can customize the serializer behaviour in a variety of ways, consult
the :class:`~html5lib.serializer.htmlserializer.HTMLSerializer`
documentation.
Filters
~~~~~~~
You can alter the stream content with filters provided by html5lib:
* :class:`alphabeticalattributes.Filter
` sorts attributes on
tags to be in alphabetical order
* :class:`inject_meta_charset.Filter
` sets a user-specified
encoding in the correct ```` tag in the ```` section of
the document
* :class:`lint.Filter ` raises
``LintError`` exceptions on invalid tag and attribute names, invalid
PCDATA, etc.
* :class:`optionaltags.Filter `
removes tags from the stream which are not necessary to produce valid
HTML
* :class:`sanitizer.Filter ` removes
unsafe markup and CSS. Elements that are known to be safe are passed
through and the rest is converted to visible text. The default
configuration of the sanitizer follows the `WHATWG Sanitization Rules
`_.
* :class:`whitespace.Filter `
collapses all whitespace characters to single spaces unless they're in
```` or ``textarea`` tags.
To use a filter, simply wrap it around a stream:
.. code-block:: python
>>> import html5lib
>>> from html5lib.filters import sanitizer
>>> dom = html5lib.parse("")
HTMLTokenizer
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This is the default tokenizer, the heart of html5lib. The implementation
can be found in `html5lib/tokenizer.py
`_.
HTMLSanitizer
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This is a tokenizer that removes unsafe markup and CSS styles from the
input. Elements that are known to be safe are passed through and the
rest is converted to visible text. The default configuration of the
sanitizer follows the `WHATWG Sanitization Rules
`_.
The implementation can be found in `html5lib/sanitizer.py
`_.