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gazpachovsparsel

MIT 15 1 740
7.0 thousand (month) Dec 28 2012 1.1(4 years ago)
1,143 8 41 BSD-3-Clause
Jul 26 2019 1.6 million (month) 1.9.1(6 months ago)

gazpacho is a Python library for scraping web pages. It is designed to make it easy to extract information from a web page by providing a simple and intuitive API for working with the page's structure.

gazpacho uses the requests library to download the page and the lxml library to parse the HTML or XML code. It provides a way to search for elements in the page using CSS selectors, similar to BeautifulSoup.

To use gazpacho, you first need to install it via pip by running pip install gazpacho. Once it is installed, you can use the gazpacho.get() function to download a web page and create a gazpacho object. For example:

from gazpacho import get, Soup

url = "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping"
html = get(url)
soup = Soup(html)
print(soup.find('title').text)
You can also use gazpacho.get() with file-like objects, bytes or file paths.

Once you have a gazpacho object, you can use the find() and find_all() methods to search for elements in the page using CSS selectors, similar to BeautifulSoup.

gazpacho also supports searching using the select() method, which returns the first matching element, and the select_all() method, which returns all matching elements.

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:
    parsel allows you to modify the contents of an element, remove elements or add new elements to a document.
  • Support for both HTML and XML:
    parsel supports 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


css-selectorsxpath-selectors

Example Use


from gazpacho import get, Soup

# gazpacho can retrieve web pages
url = "https://webscraping.fyi/"
html = get(url)
# and parse them:
soup = Soup(html)
print(soup.find('title').text)

# search for elements like beautifulsoup:
body = soup.find("div", {"class":"item"})
print(body.text)
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"]

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