Fascinating question. a PhD student is doing some work with some filings they extracted from our platform. They ran some complex searches to identify the documents and saved them to their computer. However, they did not generate a summary of the search results so they lost immediate access to the metadata associated with the documents. They realized after some extensive work that they would like to use the metadata in their analysis. So the question was, can they get the metadata without rerunning the search? The answer is yes, particularly since they are working in Python. Below is some code to create a list of dictionaries of the metadata embedded in the htm files in the source folder. We use the LXML library. I think many of you might be using BeautifulSoup. If so I think there is a small modification needed. The key though is that we add the meta as elements with attributes, so we can pull those elements and get their attributes rather cleanly.

import glob
from lxml import html
import os
meta_list = []
for htm_document in glob.glob(source_dir + os.sep + '*.htm'):
    with open(htm_document,'rb') as fh:
    b_string = fh.read()
    meta_dict = dict()
    tree = html.fromstring(b_string)
    meta_e = tree.xpath('.//meta')
    if len(meta_e) == 0:
    print(f'no meta {htm_document}')
    for m in meta_e:
      attrib = m.attrib
      meta_dict[attrib['name']] = attrib['content']
    meta_dict['source_path'] = htm_document
    meta_list.append(meta_dict)

I pulled out an 8-K filing and ran the above code on an 8-K filed by Apple. Here is the result:

{'DOCTYPE': '8K', 'SECPATH': 'https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/320193/000119312521001982/d29637d8k.htm', 'ACCEPTANCE': '20210105163216', 'SICCODE': '3571', 'CNAME': 'Apple Inc.', 'FYEND': '0925', 'ITEM_5.02': 'YES'}