parse5vslxml
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.
lxml is a low-level XML and HTML tree processor. It's used by many other libraries such as parsel or beautifulsoup for higher level HTML parsing.
One of the main features of lxml is its speed and efficiency.
It is built on top of the libxml2 and libxslt C libraries, which are known for their high performance and low memory footprint.
This makes lxml well-suited for processing large and complex XML and HTML documents.
One of the key components of lxml is the ElementTree API, which is modeled after the ElementTree API from the Python standard library's xml module. This API provides a simple and intuitive way to access and manipulate the elements and attributes of an XML or HTML document. It also provides a powerful and flexible Xpath engine that allows you to select elements based on their names, attributes, and contents.
Another feature of lxml is its support for parsing and creating XML documents using the XSLT standard. The lxml library provides a powerful and easy-to-use interface for applying XSLT stylesheets to XML documents, which can be used to transform and convert XML documents into other formats, such as HTML, PDF, or even other XML formats.
For web scraping it's best to use other higher level libraries that use lxml like parsel or beautifulsoup
Highlights
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));
from lxml import etree
# this is our HTML page:
html = """
<head>
<title>Hello World!</title>
</head>
<body>
<div id="product">
<h1>Product Title</h1>
<p>paragraph 1</p>
<p>paragraph2</p>
<span class="price">$10</span>
</div>
</body>
"""
tree = tree.fromstring(html)
# for parsing, LXML only supports XPath selectors:
tree.xpath('//span[@class="price"]')[0].text
"$10"