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13. Structured Markup Processing Tools

Python supports a variety of modules to work with various forms of structured data markup. This includes modules to work with the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) and the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), and several interfaces for working with the Extensible Markup Language (XML).

It is important to note that modules in the `xml` package require that there be at least one SAX-compliant XML parser available. Python includes an interface to the Expat parser as the `xml.parsers.expat` module, but this may not be built by default on all platforms, since Expat is not always installed, or not installed in the default location for libraries. If this is the case for your system, the easiest way to add support for the `xml` package is to install the PyXML add-on package. That package provides an extended set of XML libraries for Python.

The documentation for the `xml.dom` and `xml.sax` packages are the definition of the Python bindings for the DOM and SAX interfaces.

`HTMLParser` |  | A simple parser that can handle HTML and XHTML.
`sgmllib` |  | Only as much of an SGML parser as needed to parse HTML.
`htmllib` |  | A parser for HTML documents.
`htmlentitydefs` |  | Definitions of HTML general entities.
`xml.parsers.expat` |  | An interface to the Expat non-validating XML parser.
`xml.dom` |  | Document Object Model API for Python.
`xml.dom.minidom` |  | Lightweight Document Object Model (DOM) implementation.
`xml.dom.pulldom` |  | Support for building partial DOM trees from SAX events.
`xml.sax` |  | Package containing SAX2 base classes and convenience functions.
`xml.sax.handler` |  | Base classes for SAX event handlers.
`xml.sax.saxutils` |  | Convenience functions and classes for use with SAX.
`xml.sax.xmlreader` |  | Interface which SAX-compliant XML parsers must implement.
`xmllib` |  | A parser for XML documents.

See Also:

Python/XML Libraries
  Home page for the PyXML package, containing an extension of `xml` package bundled with Python.