domcrawlervspyquery
DOMCrawler library is part of the Symfony Components project and provides an easy way to traverse and manipulate HTML and XML documents using the Document Object Model (DOM) in PHP.
DOMcrawler supports both CSS selectors and XPath for HTML document parsing and is one the most popular HTML parsing tools used in web scraping with PHP.
PyQuery is a Python library for working with XML and HTML documents. It is similar to BeautifulSoup and is often used as a drop-in replacement for it.
PyQuery is inspired by javascript's jQuery and uses similar API allowing selecting of HTML nodes through CSS selectors. This makes it easy for developers who are already familiar with jQuery to use PyQuery in Python.
Unlike jQuery, PyQuery doesn't support XPath selectors and relies entirely on CSS selectors though offers similar HTML parsing features like selection of HTML elements, their attributes and text as well as html tree modification.
PyQuery also comes with a http client (through requests) so it can load and parse web URLs by itself.
Highlights
Example Use
use Symfony\Component\DomCrawler\Crawler;
$html = '<html><body><h1 class="title">Hello World</h1></body></html>';
$crawler = new Crawler($html);
// Find all elements using CSS selectors
$elements = $crawler->filter('.title')i;
// or XPath
$elements = $crawler->filterXPath('//h1');
// Print the text content of the elements
foreach ($elements as $element) {
echo $element->textContent;
}
from pyquery import PyQuery as pq
# 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>
"""
doc = pq(html)
# we can use CSS selectors:
print(doc('#product .price').text())
"$10"
# it's also possible to modify HTML tree in various ways:
# insert text into selected element:
print(doc('h1').append('<span>discounted</span>'))
"<h1>Product Title<span>discounted</span></h1>"
# or remove elements
doc('p').remove()
print(doc('#product').html())
"""
<h1>Product Title<span>discounted</span></h1>
<span class="price">$10</span>
"""
# pyquery can also retrieve web documents using requests:
doc = pq(url='http://httpbin.org/html', headers={"User-Agent": "webscraping.fyi"})
print(doc('h1').html())