choppervsnokogiri
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.
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
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;}
"""
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}"