Python html5lib Skipped Elements

By  on  

I've been working on some interesting python stuff at Mozilla and one task recently called for called for rending a page and then finding elements with a URL attribute value (like img[src] or a[href]) and ensuring they become absolute URLs.  One problem I encountered when using html5lib was that LINK and IMG elements were being skipped when I tokenized the HTML.  After browsing through the html5lib source code, I found a variable called voidElements which included both LINK and IMAGE:

voidElements = frozenset((
    "base",
    "command",
    "event-source",
    "link",
    "meta",
    "hr",
    "br",
    "img",
    "embed",
    "param",
    "area",
    "col",
    "input",
    "source"
))

When I commented out those two elements, they were found upon next run of my routine, meaning their presence in the set were causing me problems.  Here's how I skirted the issue:

new_void_set = set()
for item in html5lib_constants.voidElements:
	new_void_set.add(item)
new_void_set.remove('link')
new_void_set.remove('img')
html5lib_constants.voidElements = frozenset(new_void_set)

Since voidElements is a frozenset, I couldn't simply remove LINK and IMG, so I needed to create a new frozenset without those elements.  Let me know if there's a more python-ish way of creating this frozen set.  In an event, delving into the deep recesses of html5lib paid off and I accomplished the goal!

Recent Features

Incredible Demos

  • By
    9 Incredible CodePen Demos

    CodePen is a treasure trove of incredible demos harnessing the power of client side languages.   The client side is always limited by what browsers provide us but the creativity and cleverness of developers always pushes the boundaries of what we think the front end can do.  Thanks to CSS...

  • By
    Introducing MooTools ScrollSpy

    I've been excited to release this plugin for a long time. MooTools ScrollSpy is a unique but simple MooTools plugin that listens to page scrolling and fires events based on where the user has scrolled to in the page. Now you can fire specific...

Discussion

  1. You could use list comprehension to filter the elements instead; something like:

    html5lib_constants.voidElements = frozenset([e for e in html5lib_constants.voidElements if e not in [“link”, “img”]])

    Sounds like it would be useful to add void element overriding as a feature to the library in the future, though.

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!