Building and editing a tree

Everything so far read a document that already existed. You can also build one. Construct nodes from their classes and assemble them with append(); the text setter fills an element with a single text child:

import turbohtml
from turbohtml import Element, Comment

article = turbohtml.Element("article", {"class": "post"})
title = turbohtml.Element("h1")
title.text = "Tea"
article.append(title)
article.append(Comment("draft"))
print(article.html)

<article class="post"><h1>Tea</h1><!--draft--></article>

A list value for a token-list attribute (class, rel, …) joins on a space, and None (or "") sets an empty attribute, which reads back as the empty string:

print(turbohtml.Element("input", {"class": ["a", "b"], "disabled": None}).html)

<input class="a b" disabled="">

Editing a parsed tree uses the BeautifulSoup vocabulary (insert_before, replace_with, wrap, unwrap, decompose), and element.attrs is a live mapping you assign to. A node already in a tree moves; a node from another tree is adopted by copy:

doc = turbohtml.parse("<p>keep <b>bold</b> <span>drop</span></p>")
print(doc.find("b").unwrap())
doc.find("span").decompose()
doc.find("p").attrs["class"] = "lead"
print(doc.find("p").html)

Element('b')
<p class="lead">keep bold </p>

Duplicate a subtree with copy.deepcopy() (or pickle); the clone is a standalone tree you can edit without touching the original:

import copy

clone = copy.deepcopy(article)
clone.append(turbohtml.Element("footer"))
print(clone.html == article.html)

False

When you serialize, set an Html config’s layout to a Minify to shrink the output without changing what it means: it folds insignificant whitespace, omits optional tags, unquotes safe attributes, and strips comments, and the result reparses to the same tree. Here the </li> tags stay because real whitespace separates the items:

from turbohtml import Html, Minify

page = turbohtml.parse("<ul>\n  <li>one</li>\n  <li>two</li>\n</ul>")
print(page.find("ul").serialize(Html(layout=Minify())))

<ul> <li>one</li> <li>two</li> </ul>

With a tree you can build and reshape, continue to Exporting to text to turn it back into text.