Python in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

The htmllib Module

The htmllib module supplies a class named HTMLParser that subclasses SGMLParser and defines start_tag, do_tag, and end_tag methods for HTML 2.0 tags. HTMLParser implements and overrides methods to perform calls to methods of a formatter object, covered in “The formatter Module” in The htmllib Module. You can subclass HTMLParser and override methods. In addition to start_tag, do_tag, and end_tag methods, an instance h of HTMLParser supplies the following attributes and methods.

anchor_bgn	h.anchor_bgn(href,name,type) Called for each <a> tag. href, name, and type are the string values of the tag’s attributes with the same names. HTMLParser’s implementation of anchor_bgn maintains a list of outgoing hyperlink targets (i.e., href arguments of method s.anchor_bgn) in an instance attribute named s.anchorlist.
anchor_end	h.anchor_end( ) Called for each </a> end tag. HTMLParser’s implementation of anchor_end emits to the formatter a footnote reference that is an index within s.anchorlist. In other words, by default, HTMLParser asks the formatter to format an <a>/</a> tag pair as the text inside the tag, followed by a footnote reference number that points to the URL in the <a> tag. Of course, it’s up to the formatter to deal with this formatting request.
anchorlist	The h.anchor_list attribute contains the list of outgoing hyperlink target URLs, as built by method h.anchor_bgn.
formatter	The h.formatter attribute is the formatter object f associated with h, which you pass as the ...