How to handle an empty HTML element without the ending slash?

Question

I try to convert an HTML page into a tree structure. I have derived this class (I removed what I actually do with each tag as it's not relevant) : ``` class PageParser(html.parser.HTMLParser): def handle_starttag(self, tag, attrs): print("start "+tag) def handle_endtag(self, tag): print("end "+tag) def handle_startendtag(self, tag, attrs): print("startend "+tag) ``` I expected empty elements to trigger the `handle_startendtag` method. The problem is that, when encountering an empty element like ``, only the `handle_starttag` method is called. The tag is never closed from my class' point of view : ``` parser = PageParser() parser.feed('

') ``` prints : ``` start div start meta end div ``` I need to know when each element has been closed to correctly create the tree. How can I know if a tag is an empty element ?

Accepted Answer

Checking the documentation, and specifically this example:

Parsing an element with a few attributes and a title:

```
>>>parser.feed('<img src="python-logo.png" alt="The Python logo">')
Start tag: img
    attr: ('src', 'python-logo.png')
    attr: ('alt', 'The Python logo')
```

We can determine that this is the expected behavior.

The best suggestion come from @HenryHeath 's comment: Use BeautifulSoup.

If you don't want to use it though, you can work around the expected behavior of `HTMLParser` as follows:

- This is a list of every HTML 5.2 void element.

Create a list with those element names:

```
void_elements = ['area', 'base', ... , 'wbr']
```

In `handle_starttag` check if the tag is in the `void_elements` list:

```
class PageParser(html.parser.HTMLParser):
    def handle_starttag(self, tag, attrs):
        if tag in void_elements:
            # DO what should happen inside handle_startendtag()
            print("void element "+tag)
        else:
            print("start "+tag)
```

Good luck :)

How to handle an empty HTML element without the ending slash?

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