[SOLVED] [Beautiful Soup] How to deprettify?

Winfried · (This post was last modified: Yesterday, 03:46 PM by Winfried.)

Hello,

I made the mistake of using soup.prettify() to save soups to files, and I now have whitespaces that show up as useless spaces when viewing the files in an HTML WYSIWYG editor.

The following code doesn't work to remove those useless whitespaces.

Before I write a Python script to run the files through Tidy instead, does someone know if it can be fixed with BS?

Thank you.

for file in glob.glob("*.html"):
	BASE = Path(file).stem
	OUTPUTFILE = fr"{BASE}.CONV.html" 
	
	soup = BeautifulSoup(open(file,"br"),"lxml")
	for tag in soup.find_all():
		if tag.string:
			tag.string.replace_with(' '.join(tag.string.split()))
			print(tag.string)
		else:
			print(tag.name, " no string")
			pass

	with open(OUTPUTFILE, 'w', encoding='utf-8') as outp:
		outp.write(str(soup))

***snippsat*** · Yesterday, 11:15 AM

To show the problem.

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

html = '''\
<body>
  <h1>This is a Heading</h1>
  <p>This is a paragraph</p>
  <p>blue car</p>
</body>'''

soup = BeautifulSoup(html, 'lxml')
print(soup.prettify())
print('-' * 25)
print(str(soup))

Output:<body>
 <h1>
  This is a Heading
 </h1>
 <p>
  This is a paragraph
 </p>
 <p>
  blue car
 </p>
</body>

-------------------------
<body>
<h1>This is a Heading</h1>
<p>This is a paragraph</p>
<p>blue car</p>
</body>

So the new line is annoying(i tried to fix it a long time ago),now just ways under.
Easy fix is to use to html formatting online eg code beautify.
Or install Prettier,has a command line tool eg use prettier --write . formatt all html file in a folder.

G:\div_code\html_file
λ prettier --write .
h1.html 170ms
h2.html 5ms

Then output of both from BS option over will be correct formatted html.

Output:<body>
  <h1>This is a Heading</h1>
  <p>This is a paragraph</p>
  <p>blue car</p>
</body>

Winfried · Yesterday, 03:46 PM

Thank you.

Possibly Related Threads…
Thread		Author	Replies	Views	Last Post
	[SOLVED] [Beautiful Soup] Replace tag.string from another file?	Winfried	2	269	Yesterday, 03:43 PM Last Post: Winfried
	[SOLVED] [Beautiful Soup] Move line to top in HTML head?	Winfried	0	307	Apr-13-2025, 05:50 AM Last Post: Winfried
	Trouble selecting attribute with beautiful soup	bananatoast	3	2,909	Jan-30-2022, 10:01 AM Last Post: bananatoast
	I need help parsing through data and creating a database using beautiful soup	username369	1	2,361	Sep-22-2021, 08:45 PM Last Post: Larz60+

[SOLVED] [Beautiful Soup] How to deprettify?

User Panel Messages

Announcements