ENH: add ability to read html tables directly into DataFrames

use __import__ on 2.6

extra code from previous merges and importlib failure on tests

fix bs4 issues with no match provided

docstring storm!

markup slow tests (bank list data) and add tests for failing parameter values
PTF

ok that is really it for docstring mania

add testfor multiple matches

Author: cpcloud

ci/install.sh

@@ -75,6 +75,8 @@ if ( ! $VENV_FILE_AVAILABLE ); then
         pip install $PIP_ARGS xlrd>=0.9.0
         pip install $PIP_ARGS 'http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/pytseries/scikits.timeseries/0.91.3/scikits.timeseries-0.91.3.tar.gz?r='
         pip install $PIP_ARGS patsy
+        pip install $PIP_ARGS lxml
+        pip install $PIP_ARGS beautifulsoup4
 
         # fool statsmodels into thinking pandas was already installed
         # so it won't refuse to install itself. We want it in the zipped venv

doc/source/api.rst

@@ -50,6 +50,13 @@ File IO
    read_csv
    ExcelFile.parse
 
+.. currentmodule:: pandas.io.html
+
+.. autosummary::
+   :toctree: generated/
+
+   read_html
+
 HDFStore: PyTables (HDF5)
 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 .. currentmodule:: pandas.io.pytables

doc/source/install.rst

@@ -99,6 +99,12 @@ Optional Dependencies
   * `openpyxl <http://packages.python.org/openpyxl/>`__, `xlrd/xlwt <http://www.python-excel.org/>`__
      * openpyxl version 1.6.1 or higher
      * Needed for Excel I/O
+  * `lxml <http://lxml.de>`__, or `Beautiful Soup 4 <http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup>`__: for reading HTML tables
+     * The differences between lxml and Beautiful Soup 4 are mostly speed (lxml
+       is faster), however sometimes Beautiful Soup returns what you might
+       intuitively expect. Both backends are implemented, so try them both to
+       see which one you like. They should return very similar results.
+     * Note that lxml requires Cython to build successfully
 
 .. note::
 

pandas/__init__.py

@@ -33,6 +33,7 @@
                                read_fwf, to_clipboard, ExcelFile,
                                ExcelWriter)
 from pandas.io.pytables import HDFStore, Term, get_store, read_hdf
+from pandas.io.html import read_html
 from pandas.util.testing import debug
 
 from pandas.tools.describe import value_range