parse5vscheerio
parse5 is a Node.js library for parsing and manipulating HTML and XML documents. It is designed to be fast and flexible, and it is commonly used in web scraping and web development projects.
parse5 is used by popular libraries such as Angular, Lit, Cheerio and many more. Unlike Cheerio parse5 is a low level html parsing library that might be useful directly in web scraping without higher level abstraction.
cheerio is a popular JavaScript library that allows you to interact with and manipulate HTML and XML documents in a similar way to how you would with jQuery in a browser. It is a fast, flexible, and lean implementation of core jQuery designed specifically for the server.
One of the main benefits of using cheerio is that it allows you to use jQuery-like syntax to navigate and m anipulate the Document Object Model (DOM) of an HTML or XML document, making it easy to work with.
cheerio supports CSS selectors though not XPath.
Example Use
const parse5 = require("parse5");
// parse string
const document = parse5.parse('<html><body>Hello World!</body></html>');
console.log(document);
// html tree can be traversed as javascript object:
const body = document.childNodes[1];
console.log(body.childNodes[0].value); // "Hello World!"
// and modified
const newElement = parse5.parseFragment('<p>New Element</p>');
body.appendChild(newElement.childNodes[0]);
console.log(parse5.serialize(document));
const cheerio = require('cheerio');
const $ = cheerio.load('<html><head><title>My title</title></head><body><h1 class='name'>Hello World!</h1></body></html>');
// use css selectors
console.log($('title').text()); // My title
console.log($('.name').text()); // Hello World!
// select multiple elements
const $ = cheerio.load('<html><body><ul><li>item 1</li><li>item 2</li></ul></body></html>');
$('li').each(function(i, elem) {
console.log($(this).text());
});
// modify elements
const $ = cheerio.load('<html><body><h1>Hello World!</h1></body></html>');
$('h1').text('Hello, Cheerio!');
console.log($.html());