Skip to content

xpathvsselectolax

MIT 13 2 692
58.1 thousand (month) Jun 08 2019 v1.3.2(22 days ago)
1,118 1 20 MIT
Mar 01 2018 1.4 million (month) 0.3.25(2 days ago)

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.

selectolax is a fast and lightweight library for parsing HTML and XML documents in Python. It is designed to be a drop-in replacement for the popular BeautifulSoup library, with significantly faster performance.

selectolax uses a Cython-based parser to quickly parse and navigate through HTML and XML documents. It provides a simple and intuitive API for working with the document's structure, similar to BeautifulSoup.

To use selectolax, you first need to install it via pip by running pip install selectolax``. Once it is installed, you can use theselectolax.html.fromstring()function to parse an HTML document and create a selectolax object. For example:

from selectolax.parser import HTMLParser

html_string = "<html><body>Hello, World!</body></html>"
root = HTMLParser(html_string).root
print(root.tag) # html
You can also useselectolax.html.fromstring()with file-like objects, bytes or file paths, as well asselectolax.xml.fromstring()`` for parsing XML documents.

Once you have a selectolax object, you can use the select() method to search for elements in the document using CSS selectors, similar to BeautifulSoup. For example:

body = root.select("body")[0]
print(body.text()) # "Hello, World!"

Like BeautifulSoups find and find_all methods selectolax also supports searching using the search()`` method, which returns the first matching element, and thesearch_all()`` method, which returns all matching elements.

Example Use


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!
  }
}
from selectolax.parser import HTMLParser

html_string = "<html><body>Hello, World!</body></html>"
root = HTMLParser(html_string).root
print(root.tag) # html

# use css selectors:
body = root.select("body")[0]
print(body.text()) # "Hello, World!"

# find first matching element:
body = root.search("body")
print(body.text()) # "Hello, World!"

# or all matching elements:
html_string = "<html><body><p>paragraph1</p><p>paragraph2</p></body></html>"
root = HTMLParser(html_string).root
for el in root.search_all("p"):
  print(el.text()) 
# will print:
# paragraph 1
# paragraph 2

Alternatives / Similar


Was this page helpful?