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pythonxhtmlbeautifulsoupxml-declaration

How Do I Remove An XML Declaration Using BeautifulSoup4

I have an XHTML file that is structured like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
...
</head>
<body>
...
</body>
<html>

I'm using BeautifulSoup and I want to remove the XML declaration from the document, so what I have looks like this:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
...
</head>
<body>
...
</body>
<html>

I can't find a way to get at the XML declaration to remove it. It doesn't appear to be a Doctype, Declaration, Tag, or NavigableString as far as I can tell. Is there a way I can find this to extract it?

As a working example, I can remove the Doctype with code like this (assuming the document text is the variable "html"):

soup = BeautifulSoup(html)
[item.extract() for item in soup.contents if isinstance(item, Doctype)]
Solution

  • You could use the following approach:

    import bs4

soup = bs4.BeautifulSoup(html, 'html.parser')

for e in soup:
    if isinstance(e, bs4.element.ProcessingInstruction):
        e.extract()
        break

print(soup)

    For your sample, this would give you the updated HTML as:

    <!DOCTYPE html>

<html lang="en">
<head>
...
</head>
<body>
...
</body>
<html></html></html>