html5-parservshtml5lib
html5-parser is a Python library for parsing HTML and XML documents.
A fast implementation of the HTML 5 parsing spec for Python. Parsing is done in C using a variant of the gumbo parser. The gumbo parse tree is then transformed into an lxml tree, also in C, yielding parse times that can be a thirtieth of the html5lib parse times. That is a speedup of 30x. This differs, for instance, from the gumbo python bindings, where the initial parsing is done in C but the transformation into the final tree is done in python.
It is built on top of the popular lxml library and provides a simple and intuitive API for working with the document's structure.
html5-parser uses the HTML5 parsing algorithm, which is more lenient and forgiving than the traditional XML-based parsing algorithm. This means that it can parse HTML documents with malformed or missing tags and still produce a usable parse tree.
To use html5-parser, you first need to install it via pip by running pip install html5-parser
.
Once it is installed, you can use the html5_parser.parse() function to parse an HTML document and create a parse tree. For example:
from html5_parser import parse
html_string = "<html><body>Hello, World!</body></html>"
root = parse(html_string)
print(root.tag) # html
Once you have a parse tree, you can use the find()
and findall()
methods to search for elements
in the document similar to BeautifulSoup.
html5-parser also supports searching using xpath, similar to lxml.
html5lib is a pure-python library for parsing HTML. It is designed to conform to the WHATWG HTML specification, as is implemented by all major web browsers.
As html5lib is implemented in pure-python it is significantly slower than alternatives powered by lxml
(like parsel
or beautifulsoup
).
However, html5lib implements a more true html5 parsing which can represent HTML tree more correctly than alternatives.
Example Use
from html5_parser import parse
html_string = "<html><body>Hello, World!</body></html>"
root = parse(html_string)
print(root.tag) # html
body = root.find("body")
# or find all
print(body.text) # "Hello, World!"
for el in root.findall("p"):
print(el.text) # "Hello
import html5lib
from html5lib import parse
html_doc = "<html><head><title>My Title</title></head><body></body></html>"
parsed = parse(html_doc)
title = parsed.getElementsByTagName("title")[0]
print(title.childNodes[0].nodeValue)