Chapter 9. Parsing Specific Data Types

In this chapter, we will cover the following recipes:

  • Parsing dates and times with dateutil
  • Timezone lookup and conversion
  • Extracting URLs from HTML with lxml
  • Cleaning and stripping HTML
  • Converting HTML entities with BeautifulSoup
  • Detecting and converting character encodings

Introduction

This chapter covers parsing specific kinds of data, focusing primarily on dates, times, and HTML. Luckily, there are a number of useful libraries to accomplish this, so we don't have to delve into tricky and overly complicated regular expressions. These libraries can be great complements to NLTK:

  • dateutil provides datetime parsing and timezone conversion
  • lxml and BeautifulSoup can parse, clean, and convert HTML
  • charade and UnicodeDammit ...

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