choppervsrequests-html
Chopper is a tool to extract elements from HTML by preserving ancestors and CSS rules.
Compared to other HTML parsers Chopper is designed to retain original HTML tree but eliminate elements that do not match parsing rules. Meaning, we can parse HTML elements and keep thei structure for machine learning or other tasks where data structure is needed as well as the data value.
requests-html is a Python package that allows you to easily make HTTP requests and parse the HTML content of web pages. It is built on top of the popular requests package and uses the html parser from the lxml library, which makes it fast and efficient. This package is designed to provide a simple and convenient API for web scraping, and it supports features such as JavaScript rendering, CSS selectors, and form submissions.
It also offers a lot of functionalities such as cookie, session, and proxy support, which makes it an easy-to-use package for web scraping and web automation tasks.
In short requests-html offers:
- Full JavaScript support!
- CSS Selectors (a.k.a jQuery-style, thanks to PyQuery).
- XPath Selectors, for the faint of heart.
- Mocked user-agent (like a real web browser).
- Automatic following of redirects.
- Connection–pooling and cookie persistence.
- The Requests experience you know and love, with magical parsing abilities.
- Async Support
Example Use
HTML = """
<html>
<head>
<title>Test</title>
</head>
<body>
<div id="header"></div>
<div id="main">
<div class="iwantthis">
HELLO WORLD
<a href="/nope">Do not want</a>
</div>
</div>
<div id="footer"></div>
</body>
</html>
"""
CSS = """
div { border: 1px solid black; }
div#main { color: blue; }
div.iwantthis { background-color: red; }
a { color: green; }
div#footer { border-top: 2px solid red; }
"""
extractor = Extractor.keep('//div[@class="iwantthis"]').discard('//a')
html, css = extractor.extract(HTML, CSS)
# will result in:
html
"""
<html>
<body>
<div id="main">
<div class="iwantthis">
HELLO WORLD
</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>"""
css
"""
div{border:1px solid black;}
div#main{color:blue;}
div.iwantthis{background-color:red;}
"""
from requests_html import HTMLSession
session = HTMLSession()
r = session.get('https://www.example.com')
# print the HTML content of the page
print(r.html.html)
# use CSS selectors to find specific elements on the page
title = r.html.find('title', first=True)
print(title.text)