BUG: Convert <br> to space in pd.read_html

doc/source/whatsnew/v1.5.0.rst

@@ -353,6 +353,7 @@ I/O
 - Bug in :func:`read_csv` not recognizing line break for ``on_bad_lines="warn"`` for ``engine="c"`` (:issue:`41710`)
 - Bug in :func:`read_parquet` when ``engine="pyarrow"`` which caused partial write to disk when column of unsupported datatype was passed (:issue:`44914`)
 - Bug in :func:`DataFrame.to_excel` and :class:`ExcelWriter` would raise when writing an empty DataFrame to a ``.ods`` file (:issue:`45793`)
+- Bug in :func:`read_html` where elements surrounding ``<br>`` were joined without a space between them (:issue:`29528`)
 
 Period
 ^^^^^^

pandas/io/html.py

@@ -622,7 +622,13 @@ def _build_doc(self):
         else:
             udoc = bdoc
             from_encoding = self.encoding
-        return BeautifulSoup(udoc, features="html5lib", from_encoding=from_encoding)
+
+        soup = BeautifulSoup(udoc, features="html5lib", from_encoding=from_encoding)
+
+        for br in soup.find_all("br"):
+            br.replace_with("\n" + br.text)
+
+        return soup
 
 
 def _build_xpath_expr(attrs) -> str:
@@ -759,6 +765,10 @@ def _build_doc(self):
         else:
             if not hasattr(r, "text_content"):
                 raise XMLSyntaxError("no text parsed from document", 0, 0, 0)
+
+        for br in r.xpath("*//br"):
+            br.tail = "\n" + (br.tail or "")
+
         return r
 
     def _parse_thead_tr(self, table):

pandas/tests/io/test_html.py

@@ -611,17 +611,17 @@ def try_remove_ws(x):
         )
         assert df.shape == ground_truth.shape
         old = [
-            "First Vietnamese American BankIn Vietnamese",
-            "Westernbank Puerto RicoEn Espanol",
-            "R-G Premier Bank of Puerto RicoEn Espanol",
-            "EurobankEn Espanol",
-            "Sanderson State BankEn Espanol",
-            "Washington Mutual Bank(Including its subsidiary Washington "
+            "First Vietnamese American Bank In Vietnamese",
+            "Westernbank Puerto Rico En Espanol",
+            "R-G Premier Bank of Puerto Rico En Espanol",
+            "Eurobank En Espanol",
+            "Sanderson State Bank En Espanol",
+            "Washington Mutual Bank (Including its subsidiary Washington "
             "Mutual Bank FSB)",
-            "Silver State BankEn Espanol",
-            "AmTrade International BankEn Espanol",
-            "Hamilton Bank, NAEn Espanol",
-            "The Citizens Savings BankPioneer Community Bank, Inc.",
+            "Silver State Bank En Espanol",
+            "AmTrade International Bank En Espanol",
+            "Hamilton Bank, NA En Espanol",
+            "The Citizens Savings Bank Pioneer Community Bank, Inc.",
         ]
         new = [
             "First Vietnamese American Bank",
@@ -1286,3 +1286,22 @@ def test_parse_path_object(self, datapath):
         df1 = self.read_html(file_path_string)[0]
         df2 = self.read_html(file_path)[0]
         tm.assert_frame_equal(df1, df2)
+
+    def test_parse_br_as_space(self):
+        # GH 29528: pd.read_html() convert <br> to space
+        result = self.read_html(
+            """
+            <table>
+                <tr>
+                    <th>A</th>
+                </tr>
+                <tr>
+                    <td>word1<br>word2</td>
+                </tr>
+            </table>
+        """
+        )[0]
+
+        expected = DataFrame(data=[["word1 word2"]], columns=["A"])
+
+        tm.assert_frame_equal(result, expected)