How to create a table of contents for HTML text in Python?

Question

Suppose I have some kind of HTML code like this (generated from Markdown or Textile or something else):

<h1>A header</h1>
<p>Foo</p>
<h2>Another header</h2>
<p>More content</p>
<h2>Different header</h2>
<h1>Another toplevel header
<!-- and so on -->

How can I generate a table of contents for it using Python?

Answer 1

Use an HTML parser like lxml or BeautifulSoup to find all the title elements.

Answer 2

Here is an example using lxml and xpath.

from lxml import etree
doc = etree.parse("test.xml")
for node in doc.xpath('//h1|//h2|//h3|//h4|//h5'):
    print node.tag, node.text