I've just started tinkering with scrapy in conjunction with BeautifulSoup and I'm wondering if I'm missing something very obvious but I can't seem to figure out how to get the doctype of a returned html document from the resulting soup object.
Given the following html:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset=utf-8 />
<meta name="viewport" content="width=620" />
<title>HTML5 Demos and Examples</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/html5demos.css" type="text/css" />
<script src="js/h5utils.js"></script>
</head>
<body>
<p id="firstpara" align="center">This is paragraph <b>one</b>
<p id="secondpara" align="blah">This is paragraph <b>two</b>.
</html>
Can anyone tell me if there's a way of extracting the declared doctype from it using BeautifulSoup?
You can go through top-level elements and check each to see whether it is a declaration. Then you can inspect it to find out what kind of declaration it is:
You could just fetch the first item in soup contents:
Beautiful Soup 4 has a class for DOCTYPE declarations, so you can use that to extract all the declarations at top level (though you're no doubt expecting one or none!)