Chopper is a tool to extract elements from HTML by preserving ancestors and CSS rules.
Compatible with Python >= 2.6, <= 3.4
pip install chopper
http://chopper.readthedocs.org/en/latest/
from chopper.extractor import Extractor
HTML = """
<html>
<head>
<title>Test</title>
</head>
<body>
<div id="header"></div>
<div id="main">
<div class="iwantthis">
HELLO WORLD
<a href="/nope">Do not want</a>
</div>
</div>
<div id="footer"></div>
</body>
</html>
"""
CSS = """
div { border: 1px solid black; }
div#main { color: blue; }
div.iwantthis { background-color: red; }
a { color: green; }
div#footer { border-top: 2px solid red; }
"""
extractor = Extractor.keep('//div[@class="iwantthis"]').discard('//a')
html, css = extractor.extract(HTML, CSS)The result is :
>>> html
"""
<html>
<body>
<div id="main">
<div class="iwantthis">
HELLO WORLD
</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>"""
>>> css
"""
div{border:1px solid black;}
div#main{color:blue;}
div.iwantthis{background-color:red;}
"""