domcrawlervsselectolax
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.
selectolax is a fast and lightweight library for parsing HTML and XML documents in Python. It is designed to be a drop-in replacement for the popular BeautifulSoup library, with significantly faster performance.
selectolax uses a Cython-based parser to quickly parse and navigate through HTML and XML documents. It provides a simple and intuitive API for working with the document's structure, similar to BeautifulSoup.
To use selectolax, you first need to install it via pip by running pip install selectolax``.
Once it is installed, you can use theselectolax.html.fromstring()function to parse an HTML document and create a selectolax object.
For example:
selectolax.html.fromstring()from selectolax.parser import HTMLParser
html_string = "<html><body>Hello, World!</body></html>"
root = HTMLParser(html_string).root
print(root.tag) # html
with file-like objects, bytes or file paths,
as well asselectolax.xml.fromstring()`` for parsing XML documents.
Once you have a selectolax object, you can use the select() method to search for elements in the document using CSS selectors,
similar to BeautifulSoup. For example:
body = root.select("body")[0]
print(body.text()) # "Hello, World!"
Like BeautifulSoups find and find_all methods selectolax also supports searching using the search()`` method, which returns the first matching element,
and thesearch_all()`` method, which returns all matching elements.
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 selectolax.parser import HTMLParser
html_string = "<html><body>Hello, World!</body></html>"
root = HTMLParser(html_string).root
print(root.tag) # html
# use css selectors:
body = root.select("body")[0]
print(body.text()) # "Hello, World!"
# find first matching element:
body = root.search("body")
print(body.text()) # "Hello, World!"
# or all matching elements:
html_string = "<html><body><p>paragraph1</p><p>paragraph2</p></body></html>"
root = HTMLParser(html_string).root
for el in root.search_all("p"):
print(el.text())
# will print:
# paragraph 1
# paragraph 2