html5-phpvsparsel
HTML5 is a standards-compliant HTML5 parser and writer written entirely in PHP. It is stable and used in many production websites, and has well over five million downloads.
HTML5 provides the following features:
- An HTML5 serializer
- Support for PHP namespaces
- Composer support
- Event-based (SAX-like) parser
- A DOM tree builder
- Interoperability with QueryPath
- Runs on PHP 5.3.0 or newer
Note that html5-php is a low-level HTML parser and does not feature any query features like CSS selectors.
parsel is a library for parsing HTML and XML using selectors, similar to beautifulsoup. It is built on top of the lxml library and allows for easy extraction of data from HTML and XML files using selectors, similar to how you would use CSS selectors in web development. It is a light-weight library which is specifically designed for web scraping and parsing, so it is more efficient and faster than beautifulsoup in some use cases.
Some of the key features of parsel include:
- CSS selector & XPath selector support:
Two most common html parsing path languages are both supported in parsel. This allows selecting attributes, tags, text and complex matching rules that use regular expressions or XPath functions. - Modifying data:
parselallows you to modify the contents of an element, remove elements or add new elements to a document. - Support for both HTML and XML:
parselsupports both HTML and XML documents and you can use the same selectors for both formats.
It is easy to use and less verbose than beautifulsoup, so it's quite popular among the developers who are working with Web scraping projects and parse data from large volume of web pages.
Highlights
Example Use
<?php
// Assuming you installed from Composer:
require "vendor/autoload.php";
use Masterminds\HTML5;
// An example HTML document:
$html = <<< 'HERE'
<html>
<head>
<title>TEST</title>
</head>
<body id='foo'>
<h1>Hello World</h1>
<p>This is a test of the HTML5 parser.</p>
</body>
</html>
HERE;
// Parse the document. $dom is a DOMDocument.
$html5 = new HTML5();
$dom = $html5->loadHTML($html);
// Render it as HTML5:
print $html5->saveHTML($dom);
// Or save it to a file:
$html5->save($dom, 'out.html');
from parsel import Selector
# 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>
"""
selector = Selector(html)
# we can use CSS selectors:
selector.css("#product .price::text").get()
"$10"
# or XPath:
selector.xpath('//span[@class="price"]').get()
"$10"
# or get all matching elements:
print(selector.css("#product p::text").getall())
["paragraph 1", "paragraph2"]
# parsel also comes with utility methods like regular expression parsing:
selector.xpath('//span[@class="price"]').re("\d+")
["10"]