Python: Exporting Bookmarks to CSV File

Bookmarks are an essential part of the browsing experience. They allow us to save and easily access the websites we visit frequently. But, sometimes, we need to move our bookmarks to another browser, computer or device. One common way to do this is by exporting them to a file format that can be easily imported by other browsers.

One such format is CSV (Comma-Separated Values), a popular data exchange format. However, most browsers don’t provide an easy way to export bookmarks directly to CSV. In this post, we will explore why this is the case and how we can solve this problem using Python.

Why You Can’t Export Directly Bookmarks to CSV

Bookmarks are saved as HTML files in most browsers, and the information is stored in a proprietary format. As a result, there is no straightforward way to export bookmarks to a CSV file. Instead, we need to extract the information from the HTML file and then write it to a CSV file.

How We Will Solve This Problem

To solve this problem, we will use a Python library called BeautifulSoup. BeautifulSoup is a library that makes it easy to scrape information from web pages. It is ideal for parsing HTML files and extracting the information we need.

In this post, we will write a Python script that uses BeautifulSoup to extract the bookmarks from an HTML file and write them to a CSV file.

Bookmarks to CSV: The Code

The code we will use is straightforward and easy to understand. Let’s go over each section of the code and explain how it works.

The first section of the code imports the required libraries.

import re
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import csv

The re library is not used in this code, so we can remove it.

The BeautifulSoup library is used to parse the HTML file and extract the bookmarks. The csv library is used to write the extracted bookmarks to a CSV file.

The next section of the code sets the name of the HTML file that contains the bookmarks.

bookmark_file = "bookmarks_23.html"

This line sets the name of the HTML file that contains the bookmarks to bookmarks_23.html. You should replace this with the name of your HTML file.

The next section of the code is the parse_bookmarks function. This function takes the content of the HTML file as a parameter and returns a list of bookmarks.

def parse_bookmarks(file_content):
 soup = BeautifulSoup(file_content, "html.parser")
 bookmarks = []
 
 for link in soup.find_all("a"):
  href = link.get("href")
  title = link.string
  bookmarks.append({"title": title, "href": href})
 
 return bookmarks

The first line of the function creates a BeautifulSoup object from the content of the HTML file. This allows us to parse the HTML and extract the information we need.

The next section of the code uses a for loop to iterate over all the <a> elements in the HTML file. The <a> element is used to define a hyperlink, and in this case, it is used to define a

Here is the entire code

import re
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import csv

bookmark_file = "bookmarks_2_10_23.html"

def parse_bookmarks(file_content):
 soup = BeautifulSoup(file_content, "html.parser")
 bookmarks = []
 
 for link in soup.find_all("a"):
  href = link.get("href")
  title = link.string
  bookmarks.append({"title": title, "href": href})
 
 return bookmarks

def main():
 with open(bookmark_file,  encoding='utf-8') as file:
  file_content = file.read()
  bookmarks = parse_bookmarks(file_content)
  for bookmark in bookmarks:
   print("Title:", bookmark["title"], "URL:", bookmark["href"])
  with open("bookmarks.csv", "w", encoding='utf-8', newline="") as file:
   writer = csv.writer(file)
   writer.writerow(["Title", "URL"])
   for bookmark in bookmarks:
    writer.writerow([bookmark["title"], bookmark["href"]])

if __name__ == "__main__":
 main()