htmlparser2vsxmltodict
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.
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
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();
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'