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ReadabiliPy
ReadabiliPy
contains a Python wrapper for Mozilla's Readability.js Node.js package, as well as article extraction routines written in pure Python.
This package augments the output of Readability.js
to also return a list of plain text representations of article paragraphs.
ReadabiliPy
comes with a handy command line application: readabilipy
.
Installation
To use the Readability.js
wrapper you need to have a working Node.js installation of version 14 or higher.
Make sure to install Node.js before installing this package, as this ensures Readability.js will be installed.
If you only want to use the Python-based article extraction, you do not need to install Node.js.
ReadabiliPy
can be installed simply from PyPI:
$ pip install readabilipy
Note that to update to a new version of Readability.js
you can simply reinstall ReadabiliPy
.
Usage
ReadabiliPy
can be used either as a command line application or as a Python library.
Command line application
The readabilipy
command line application can be used to extract an article from an HTML source file.
For example, if you have the article saved as input.html
in the current directory then you can run:
$ readabilipy -i ./input.html -o article.json
The extracted article can then be found in the article.json
file. By default ReadabiliPy will use the Readability.js functionality to extract the article, provided this is available. If instead you'd like to use the Python-based extraction, run:
$ readabilipy -p -i ./input.html -o article.json
The complete help text of the command line application is as follows:
$ readabilipy -h
usage: readabilipy [-h] -i INPUT_FILE -o OUTPUT_FILE [-c] [-n] [-p] [-V]
Extract article data from a HTML file using either Mozilla's Readability.js
package or a simplified python-only alternative.
optional arguments:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
-i INPUT_FILE, --input-file INPUT_FILE
Path to input file containing HTML.
-o OUTPUT_FILE, --output-file OUTPUT_FILE
Path to file to output the article data to as JSON.
-c, --content-digests
Add a 'data-content-digest' attribute containing a
SHA256-based digest of the element's contents to each
HTML element in the plain_content output.
-n, --node-indexes Add a 'data-node-index' attribute containing a
hierarchical representation of the element's position
in the HTML structure each HTML element in the
plain_content output.
-p, --use-python-parser
Use the pure-python 'plain_html' parser included in
this project rather than Mozilla's Readability.js.
-V, --version Show version and exit
Library
ReadabiliPy can also be used as a Python package.
The main routine is called simple_json_from_html_string
and expects the HTML article as a string.
Here is an example of extracting an article after downloading the page using requests:
>>> import requests
>>> from readabilipy import simple_json_from_html_string
>>> req = requests.get('https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Readability')
>>> article = simple_json_from_html_string(req.text, use_readability=True)
Note that you need to use the flag use_readability=True
to use Readability.js, otherwise the Python-based extraction is used.
The simple_json_from_html_string
function returns a dictionary with the following fields:
title
: The article titlebyline
: Author informationcontent
: A simplified HTML representation of the article, with all article text contained in paragraph elements.plain_content
: A "plain" version of the simplifiedReadability.js
article HTML present in thecontent
field. This attempts to retain only the plain text content of the article, while preserving the HTML structure.plain_text
: A list containing plain text representations of each paragraph (<p>
) or list (<ol>
or<ul>
) present in the simplifiedReadability.js
article HTML in thecontent
field. Each paragraph or list is represented as a single string. List strings look like"* item 1, * item 2, * item 3,"
for both ordered and unordered lists (note the trailing,
).
Note further that:
- All fields are guaranteed to be present. If individual fields are missing from the output of
Readability.js
, the value of these fields will beNone
. If no article data is returned byReadability.js
, the value of all fields will beNone
. - All text in the
plain_content
andplain_text
fields is encoded as unicode normalised using the "NFKC" normal form. This normal form is used to try and ensure as much as possible that things that appear visually the same are encoded with the same unicode representation (the K part) and characters are represented as a single composite character where possible (the C part). - An optional
content_digests
flag can be passed to the Python wrapper. When this is set toTrue
, each HTML element in theplain_content
field has adata-content-digest
attribute, which holds the SHA-256 hash of its plain text content. For "leaf" nodes (containing only plain text in the output), this is the SHA-256 hash of their plain text content. For nodes containing other nodes, this is the SHA-256 hash of the concatenated SHA-256 hashes of their child nodes. - An optional
node_indexes
flag can be passed to the Python wrapper. When this is set toTrue
, each HTML element in theplain_content
field has adata-node-indexes
attribute, which holds a hierarchical index describing the location of element within theplain_content
HTML structure. - An optional
use_readability
flag can be passed to the Python wrapper. When this is set toTrue
, Mozilla'sReadability.js
will be used as the parser. If it is set toFalse
then the pure-python parser inplain_html.py
will be used instead.
The second top-level function exported by ReadabiliPy is simple_tree_from_html_string
. This returns a cleaned, parsed HTML tree of the article as a BeautifulSoup object.
Notes
License: MIT License, see the LICENSE
file.
Copyright (c) 2018, The Alan Turing Institute
If you encounter any issues or have any suggestions for improvement, please open an issue on Github. You're helping to make this project better for everyone!