Get return value from HTMLParser class to main class

Question

Here my current code:

HTMLParser class:

class MyHTMLParser(HTMLParser):
    def handle_starttag(self, tag, attrs):
        if tag == "a":
            for name, value in attrs:
                if name == "href":
                    print value

Main class:

html = urllib2.urlopen(url).read()
MyHTMLParser().feed(html)

TODO: Any idea to make "value" can be return to main class? Thank for advance.

Answer 1

You store information you want to collect on your parser instance:

class MyHTMLParser(HTMLParser):
    def __init__(self):
         HTMLParser.__init__()
         self.links = []

    def handle_starttag(self, tag, attrs):
        if tag == "a" and 'href' in attrs:
            self.links.append(attrs['href'])

then after you have fed HTML into the parser you can retrieve the links attribute from the instance

parser = MyHTMLParser()
parser.feed(html)
print parser.links

For parsing HTML, I can heartily recommend you look at BeautifulSoup instead:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

soup = BeautifulSoup(html)
links = [a['href'] for a in soup.find_all('a', href=True)]