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beautifulsoupvsnokogiri

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beautifulsoup is a Python library for pulling data out of HTML and XML files. It creates parse trees from the source code that can be used to extract data from HTML, which is useful for web scraping. With beautifulsoup, you can search, navigate, and modify the parse tree. It sits atop popular Python parsers like lxml and html5lib, allowing users to try out different parsing strategies or trade speed for flexibility.

beautifulsoup has a number of useful methods and attributes that can be used to extract and manipulate data from an HTML or XML document. Some of the key features include:

  • Searching the parse tree
    You can search the parse tree using the various search methods that beautifulsoup provides, such as find(), find_all(), and select(). These methods take various arguments to search for specific tags, attributes, and text, and return a list of matching elements.
  • Navigating the parse tree
    You can navigate the parse tree using the various navigation methods that beautifulsoup provides, such as next_sibling, previous_sibling, next_element, previous_element, parent, and children. These methods allow you to move up, down, and around the parse tree.
  • Modifying the parse tree
    You can modify the parse tree using the various modification methods that beautifulsoup provides, such as append(), extend(), insert(), insert_before(), and insert_after(). These methods allow you to add new elements to the parse tree, or to change the position of existing elements.
  • Accessing tag attributes
    You can access the attributes of a tag using the attrs property. This property returns a dictionary of the tag's attributes and their values.
  • Accessing tag text
    You can access the text within a tag using the string property. This property returns the text as a string, with any leading or trailing whitespace removed.

With the above feature one can easily extract data out of HTML or XML files. It is widely used in web scraping and other data extraction projects.

It also has features for parsing XML files, special methods for dealing with HTML forms, pretty printing HTML and a few other functionalities.

Nokogiri is a Ruby gem that provides a simple and powerful way to parse and search XML and HTML documents. It is built on top of the underlying C library libxml2, which is known for its speed and reliability.

Nokogiri provides a simple and intuitive API for parsing and searching XML and HTML documents, and it is widely used in the Ruby ecosystem for web scraping and data extraction.

One of the main features of Nokogiri is its ability to search and navigate through XML and HTML documents using a CSS or XPath selectors.

Nokogiri also provides a variety of other features that can simplify the process of working with XML and HTML documents. It can automatically handle character encodings and normalize documents, it can parse and search large documents with low memory usage, and it can validate documents against a DTD or schema.

Highlights


css-selectorsdsl-selectorshttp2
css-selectorsxpathpopular

Example Use


from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

# 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>
"""

soup = BeautifulSoup(html)

# we can iterate using dot notation:
soup.head.title
"Hello World"

# or use find method to recursively find matching elements:
soup.find(class_="price").text
"$10"

# the selected elements can be modified in place:
soup.find(class_="price").string = "$20"

# beautifulsoup also supports CSS selectors:
soup.select_one("#product .price").text
"$20"

# bs4 also contains various utility functions like HTML formatting
print(soup.prettify())
"""
<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">
    $20
   </span>
  </div>
 </body>
</html>
"""
require 'nokogiri'

html_string = '<html><head><title>Page Title</title></head><body><h1 class="header-class">Hello World!</h1><p>This is a sample webpage.</p></body></html>'

# Parse the HTML string
doc = Nokogiri::HTML(html_string)

# Extract the class attribute of h1 tag using CSS selector
h1_class = doc.css("h1")[0]['class']
# or XPath
h1_class = doc.xpath("//h1")[0]['class']
puts "H1 class: #{h1_class}"

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