soupvsxpath
soup is a Go library for parsing and querying HTML documents.
It provides a simple and intuitive interface for extracting information from HTML pages. It's inspired by popular Python web scraping
library BeautifulSoup and shares similar use API implementing functions like Find
and FindAll
.
soup
can also use go's built-in http client to download HTML content.
Note that unlike beautifulsoup, soup
does not support CSS selectors or XPath.
xpath is a library for Go that allows you to use XPath expressions to select elements from an HTML document. It is built on top of the html package in the Go standard library, and provides a way to select elements from an HTML document using XPath expressions, which are more powerful and expressive than CSS selectors.
Example Use
package main
import (
"fmt"
"log"
"github.com/anaskhan96/soup"
)
func main() {
url := "https://www.bing.com/search?q=weather+Toronto"
# soup has basic HTTP client though it's not recommended for scraping:
resp, err := soup.Get(url)
if err != nil {
log.Fatal(err)
}
# create soup object from HTML
doc := soup.HTMLParse(resp)
# html elements can be found using Find or FindStrict methods:
# in this case find <div> elements where "class" attribute matches some values:
grid := doc.FindStrict("div", "class", "b_antiTopBleed b_antiSideBleed b_antiBottomBleed")
# note: to find all elements FindAll() method can be used the same way
# elements can be further searched for descendents:
heading := grid.Find("div", "class", "wtr_titleCtrn").Find("div").Text()
conditions := grid.Find("div", "class", "wtr_condition")
primaryCondition := conditions.Find("div")
secondaryCondition := primaryCondition.FindNextElementSibling()
temp := primaryCondition.Find("div", "class", "wtr_condiTemp").Find("div").Text()
others := primaryCondition.Find("div", "class", "wtr_condiAttribs").FindAll("div")
caption := secondaryCondition.Find("div").Text()
fmt.Println("City Name : " + heading)
fmt.Println("Temperature : " + temp + "˚C")
for _, i := range others {
fmt.Println(i.Text())
}
fmt.Println(caption)
}
package main
import (
"fmt"
"github.com/antchfx/xpath"
"golang.org/x/net/html"
"strings"
)
func main() {
// Create an HTML string
html := `<html>
<body>
<div id="content">
<p>Hello, World!</p>
<a href="http://example.com">Example</a>
</div>
</body>
</html>`
// Parse the HTML string into a node tree
doc, err := html.Parse(strings.NewReader(html))
if err != nil {
fmt.Println("Error:", err)
return
}
// Compile the XPath expression
expr, err := xpath.Compile("//p")
if err != nil {
fmt.Println("Error:", err)
return
}
// Use the Evaluate method to select elements from the document
nodes, err := expr.Evaluate(xpath.NodeNavigator(doc))
if err != nil {
fmt.Println("Error:", err)
return
}
if nodes.MoveNext() {
fmt.Println(nodes.Current().Value())
// > Hello, World!
}
}