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htmlparser2vscssselect

MIT 14 4 4,397
115.8 million (month) Aug 28 2011 9.1.0(8 months ago)
291 8 21 NOASSERTION
Apr 14 2012 6.9 million (month) 1.2.0(1 year, 10 months ago)

htmlparser2 is a Node.js library for parsing HTML and XML documents. It works by building a tree of elements, similar to the Document Object Model (DOM) in web browsers. This allows you to easily traverse and manipulate the structure of the document.

htmlparser2 is a low-level html tree parser but it can still be useful in web scraping as it's a powerful tool for HTML restructuring and serialization.

cssselect is a BSD-licensed Python library to parse CSS3 selectors and translate them to XPath 1.0 expressions.

XPath 1.0 expressions can be used in lxml or another XPath engine to find the matching elements in an XML or HTML document.

cssselect is used by other popular Python packages like parsel and scrapy but can also be used on it's own to generate valid XPath 1.0 expressions for parsing HTML and XML documents in other tools.

Note that because XPath selectors are more powerful than CSS selectors this translation is only possible one way. Converting XPath to CSS selectors is impractical and not supported by cssselect.

Example Use


const htmlparser = require("htmlparser2");
const parser = new htmlparser.Parser({
    onopentag: (name, attribs) => {
        console.log(`Opening tag: ${name}`);
    },
    ontext: (text) => {
        console.log(`Text: ${text}`);
    },
    onclosetag: (name) => {
        console.log(`Closing tag: ${name}`);
    }
}, {decodeEntities: true});

const html = "<p>Hello, <b>world</b>!</p>";
parser.write(html);
parser.end();
from cssselect import GenericTranslator, SelectorError

translator = GenericTranslator()
try:
    expression = translator.css_to_xpath('div.content')
    print(expression)
    'descendant-or-self::div[@class and contains(concat(' ', normalize-space(@class), ' '), ' content ')]'
except SelectorError as e:
    print(f'Invalid selector {e}')

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