BUG: read_html - file path cannot be pathlib.Path type (#37736)

* BUG: read_html - file path cannot be pathlib.Path type

* BUG: read_html - file path cannot be pathlib.Path type

* BUG: read_html - file path cannot be pathlib.Path type

* closes #37705

* Add comments closes #37705

* Update doc/source/whatsnew/v1.2.0.rst

Co-authored-by: William Ayd <william.ayd@icloud.com>

* Update pandas/tests/io/test_html.py

Co-authored-by: William Ayd <william.ayd@icloud.com>

* Fix comments closes #37705

* Fix merge issue closes #37705

Co-authored-by: William Ayd <william.ayd@icloud.com>

Author: inspurwusixuan

doc/source/whatsnew/v1.2.0.rst

@@ -507,6 +507,7 @@ I/O
 - Bug in :class:`HDFStore` was dropping timezone information when exporting :class:`Series` with ``datetime64[ns, tz]`` dtypes with a fixed HDF5 store (:issue:`20594`)
 - :func:`read_csv` was closing user-provided binary file handles when ``engine="c"`` and an ``encoding`` was requested (:issue:`36980`)
 - Bug in :meth:`DataFrame.to_hdf` was not dropping missing rows with ``dropna=True`` (:issue:`35719`)
+- Bug in :func:`read_html` was raising a ``TypeError`` when supplying a ``pathlib.Path`` argument to the ``io`` parameter (:issue:`37705`)
 
 Plotting
 ^^^^^^^^

pandas/io/html.py

@@ -20,7 +20,7 @@
 from pandas.core.construction import create_series_with_explicit_dtype
 from pandas.core.frame import DataFrame
 
-from pandas.io.common import is_url, urlopen, validate_header_arg
+from pandas.io.common import is_url, stringify_path, urlopen, validate_header_arg
 from pandas.io.formats.printing import pprint_thing
 from pandas.io.parsers import TextParser
 
@@ -1080,6 +1080,9 @@ def read_html(
             "data (you passed a negative value)"
         )
     validate_header_arg(header)
+
+    io = stringify_path(io)
+
     return _parse(
         flavor=flavor,
         io=io,

pandas/tests/io/test_html.py

@@ -2,6 +2,7 @@
 from importlib import reload
 from io import BytesIO, StringIO
 import os
+from pathlib import Path
 import re
 import threading
 from urllib.error import URLError
@@ -1233,3 +1234,11 @@ def run(self):
         while helper_thread1.is_alive() or helper_thread2.is_alive():
             pass
         assert None is helper_thread1.err is helper_thread2.err
+
+    def test_parse_path_object(self, datapath):
+        # GH 37705
+        file_path_string = datapath("io", "data", "html", "spam.html")
+        file_path = Path(file_path_string)
+        df1 = self.read_html(file_path_string)[0]
+        df2 = self.read_html(file_path)[0]
+        tm.assert_frame_equal(df1, df2)