soupvsxml2
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.
The xml2 package is a binding to libxml2, making it easy to work with HTML and XML from R. The API is somewhat inspired by jQuery.
xml2 can be used to parse HTML documents using XPath selectors and is a successor to R's XML package with a few improvements:
- xml2 takes care of memory management for you. It will automatically free the memory used by an XML document as soon as the last reference to it goes away.
- xml2 has a very simple class hierarchy so don't need to think about exactly what type of object you have, xml2 will just do the right thing.
- More convenient handling of namespaces in Xpath expressions - see xml_ns() and xml_ns_strip() to get started.
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)
}
library("xml2")
x <- read_xml("<foo> <bar> text <baz/> </bar> </foo>")
x
xml_name(x)
xml_children(x)
xml_text(x)
xml_find_all(x, ".//baz")
h <- read_html("<html><p>Hi <b>!")
h
xml_name(h)