A python script for getting the descriptions of special characters (such as greek letters or math symbols) by parsing http://www.dionysia.org/html/entities/symbols.html. The output is in a format used for CKEditor's specialChars configuration to use the description as the tooltip for the characters.

CKEditor specialChar description getter

#!/usr/local/bin/python3

from lxml import html
import requests

try:
    file = open("./symbols.txt")
    file_string = file.read().split()
except:
    file_string = 'Α α Β β Γ γ Δ δ Ε ε Ζ ζ Η η Θ θ Ι'.split()

# get the page and turn it into a tree object
page = requests.get('http://www.dionysia.org/html/entities/symbols.html')
tree = html.fromstring(page.content)

line_length = 0
final_string = ''

for symbol in file_string:
	# Find any table cells that have the symbol we're searching for and get 
	# the whole row of cells that are its siblings
    result = tree.xpath('//tr/td[contains(text(), "'+symbol+'")]/../*')
    if len(result) > 4:
		# Get the text of the description column 
        desc = result[4].text
		# only get the description. I don't care about the unicode value
        desc = desc.split(',')[0]
        # in some cases, there are multiple definitions. Just get the first one 
        desc = desc.split('=')[0]
        # remove any remaining whitespace at the start and end of the string
        desc = desc.strip()

        # Capitalize the first letter of every description
        desc = desc[0].capitalize() + desc[1:]
        current_string = "['{0}', '{1}'], ".format(symbol, desc)

		# Print the full string when you reach a particular character length
		# I am just using 80 since it's the standard line length
        if (line_length + len(current_string)) > 80:
            print(final_string)
            line_length = 0
            final_string = ''
        final_string += current_string
        line_length += len(current_string)

print(final_string)



#TODO: add the ability to use symbols passed in through command line args
#TODO: Use https://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/sgml/entities.html instead, as it's probably more reliable and has more characters.Only downside of this is that you won't be able to search by symbol, only by code