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sax-jsvscssselect

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143.7 million (month) Feb 09 2011 1.4.1(a month ago)
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Apr 14 2012 6.3 million (month) 1.2.0(1 year, 8 months ago)

sax-js is a streaming XML parser for Node.js that is built on top of the sax C library. It is designed to be fast, low-memory, and easy to use. It is commonly used for parsing large XML files, as it allows you to process the XML data incrementally, rather than loading the entire file into memory at once.

sax-js is a low-level html tree parser and does not provide html query capabilities (like CSS selectors) though it can be useful in HTML tree parsing 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 fs = require("fs");
const sax = require("sax");

const xmlStream = fs.createReadStream("example.xml");
const saxParser = sax.createStream(true, {});

saxParser.on("opentag", function(node) {
    console.log(`<${node.name}>`);
});

saxParser.on("closetag", function(nodeName) {
    console.log(`</${nodeName}>`);
});

saxParser.on("text", function(text) {
    console.log(text);
});

xmlStream.pipe(saxParser);
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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