soupvsxmltodict
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.
xmltodict is a Python library that allows you to work with XML data as if it were JSON. It allows you to parse XML documents and convert them to dictionaries, which can then be easily manipulated using standard dictionary operations.
You can also use the library to convert a dictionary back into an XML document. xmltodict is built on top of the popular lxml library and provides a simple, intuitive API for working with XML data.
Note that despite using lxml conversion speeds can be quite slow for large XML documents and in web scraping this should be used to parse specific snippets instead of whole HTML documents.
xmltodict pairs well with JSON parsing tools like jmespath or jsonpath. Alternatively, it can be used in reverse mode to parse JSON documents using HTML parsing tools like CSS selectors and XPath.
It can be installed via pip by running pip install xmltodict command.
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)
}
import xmltodict
xml_string = """
<book>
<title>The Great Gatsby</title>
<author>F. Scott Fitzgerald</author>
<publisher>Charles Scribner's Sons</publisher>
<publication_date>1925</publication_date>
</book>
"""
book_dict = xmltodict.parse(xml_string)
print(book_dict)
{'book': {'title': 'The Great Gatsby',
'author': 'F. Scott Fitzgerald',
'publisher': "Charles Scribner's Sons",
'publication_date': '1925'}}
# and to reverse:
book_xml = xmltodict.unparse(book_dict)
print(book_xml)
# the xml can be loaded and parsed using parsel or beautifulsoup:
from parsel import Selector
sel = Selector(book_xml)
print(sel.css('publication_date::text').get())
'1925'