Custom indent width for BeautifulSoup .prettify()
I actually dealt with this myself, in the hackiest way possible: by post-processing the result.
r = re.compile(r'^(\s*)', re.MULTILINE)def prettify_2space(s, encoding=None, formatter="minimal"): return r.sub(r'\1\1', s.prettify(encoding, formatter))Actually, I monkeypatched prettify_2space in place of prettify in the class. That's not essential to the solution, but let's do it anyway, and make the indent width a parameter instead of hardcoding it to 2:
orig_prettify = bs4.BeautifulSoup.prettifyr = re.compile(r'^(\s*)', re.MULTILINE)def prettify(self, encoding=None, formatter="minimal", indent_width=4): return r.sub(r'\1' * indent_width, orig_prettify(self, encoding, formatter))bs4.BeautifulSoup.prettify = prettifySo:
x = '''<section><article><h1></h1><p></p></article></section>'''soup = bs4.BeautifulSoup(x)print(soup.prettify(indent_width=3))… gives:
<html> <body> <section> <article> <h1> </h1> <p> </p> </article> </section> </body></html>Obviously if you want to patch Tag.prettify as well as BeautifulSoup.prettify, you have to do the same thing there. (You might want to create a generic wrapper that you can apply to both, instead of repeating yourself.) And if there are any other prettify methods, same deal.
As far as I can tell, this feature is not built in, as there are a handful of solutions out there for this problem.
Assuming you are using BeautifulSoup 4, here are the solutions I came up with
Hardcode it in. This requires minimal changes, this is fine if you don't need the indent to be different in different circumstances:
myTab = 4 # add thisif pretty_print: # space = (' ' * (indent_level - 1)) space = (' ' * (indent_level - myTab)) #indent_contents = indent_level + 1 indent_contents = indent_level + myTab Another problem with the previous solution is that the text content wont be indented entirely consistently, but attractively, still. If you need a more flexible/consistent solution, you can just modify the class.
Find the prettify function and modify it as such (it is located in the Tag class in element.py):
#Add the myTab keyword to the functions parameters (or whatever you want to call it), set it to your preferred default.def prettify(self, encoding=None, formatter="minimal", myTab=2): Tag.myTab= myTab # add a reference to it in the Tag class if encoding is None: return self.decode(True, formatter=formatter) else: return self.encode(encoding, True, formatter=formatter)And then scroll up to the decode method in the Tag class and make the following changes:
if pretty_print: #space = (' ' * (indent_level - 1)) space = (' ' * (indent_level - Tag.myTab)) #indent_contents = indent_level + Tag.myTab indent_contents = indent_level + Tag.myTabThen go to the decode_contents method in the Tag class and make these changes:
#s.append(" " * (indent_level - 1))s.append(" " * (indent_level - Tag.myTab))Now BeautifulSoup('<root><child><desc>Text</desc></child></root>').prettify(myTab=4) will return:
<root> <child> <desc> Text </desc> </child></root>**No need to patch BeautifulSoup class as it inherits the Tag class. Patching Tag class is sufficient enough to achieve the goal.
Here's a way to increase indentation w/o meddling with original functions, etc. Create the following function:
# Increase indentation of 'text' by 'n' spacesdef add_indent(text,n): sp = " "*n lsep = chr(10) if text.find(chr(13)) == -1 else chr(13)+chr(10) lines = text.split(lsep) for i in range(len(lines)): spacediff = len(lines[i]) - len(lines[i].lstrip()) if spacediff: lines[i] = sp*spacediff + lines[i] return lsep.join(lines)Then convert the text you obtained using the above function:
x = '''<section><article><h1></h1><p></p></article></section>'''soup = bs4.BeautifulSoup(x, 'html.parser') # I don't know if you need 'html.parser'text = soup.prettify() # I do, otherwise I get a warningtext = add_indent(text,1) # Increase indentation by 1 space print(text)'''Output:<html> <body> <section> <article> <h1> </h1> <p> </p> </article> </section> </body></html>'''