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Working With HTML Files

Darren Jones
Reading and Writing Files With pandas Darren Jones 02:40
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00:00 Working with HTML files. HTML is a plaintext file that uses hypertext markup language to help browsers render web pages. The extensions for HTML files are .html and .htm.

00:16 You’ll need to install an HTML parser library like lxml or html5lib to be able to work with HTML files.

00:32 Once you have these libraries installed, you can save the contents of your DataFrame as an HTML file with .to_html().

00:48 This code generates a file data.html. You can see the contents of it onscreen. The file shows the DataFrame contents nicely. However, notice that you’ve not obtained an entire web page.

01:02 It’s just output the data that corresponds to the DataFrame in the HTML format. In a similar manner to what we’ve seen earlier, if .to_html() doesn’t receive the optional parameter buf, instead of creating a file, it will return a string.

01:18 Here are some other optional parameters: header determines whether to save the column names, index determines whether to save row labels, classes assigns CSS classes, render_links specifies whether to convert URLs to HTML links, table_id assigns a CSS id to the table tag, escape decides whether to convert the special characters seen onscreen to HTML-safe strings.

01:48 You can use parameters like these to specify different aspects of the resulting files or strings. You can create a DataFrame object from a suitable HTML file using read_html(), which will return a DataFrame instance or a list of them.

02:16 This is very similar to what you did when reading CSV files. You also have parameters that will help you work with dates, missing values, encoding, HTML parsers, and more.

02:31 Now that you’re comfortable working with HTML files, in the next section, you’ll take a deeper look at working with Excel files.

Dean on Sept. 9, 2021

I’m getting an EOL error in my code when I try to do anything with the ‘IND_DAY’ column. It’s acting like it’s not a column but I’m looking dead at it. File “<ipython-input-156-7b70654dd196>”, line 1 df_html = pd.read_html(‘data.html’, index_col=0, parse_dates=[‘IND_DAY]) ^ SyntaxError: EOL while scanning string literal

Geir Arne Hjelle RP Team on Sept. 10, 2021

Hi Dean, it looks like you’re missing the end-quote in parse_dates=['IND_DAY].

The error message says that the parser reached EOL (End-of-line) when it was reading a string literal (text between quotes).

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