Skip to content

html5-parservspyquery

Apache-2.0 1 1 681
19.3 thousand (month) Jun 03 2007 0.4.12(11 months ago)
2,298 5 55 NOASSERTION
Dec 05 2008 1.9 million (month) 2.0.1(a month ago)

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
You can also use `html5_parser.parse()`` with file-like objects, bytes or file paths.

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.

PyQuery is a Python library for working with XML and HTML documents. It is similar to BeautifulSoup and is often used as a drop-in replacement for it.

PyQuery is inspired by javascript's jQuery and uses similar API allowing selecting of HTML nodes through CSS selectors. This makes it easy for developers who are already familiar with jQuery to use PyQuery in Python.

Unlike jQuery, PyQuery doesn't support XPath selectors and relies entirely on CSS selectors though offers similar HTML parsing features like selection of HTML elements, their attributes and text as well as html tree modification.

PyQuery also comes with a http client (through requests) so it can load and parse web URLs by itself.

Highlights


css-selectors

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
from pyquery import PyQuery as pq

# 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>
"""

doc = pq(html)

# we can use CSS selectors:
print(doc('#product .price').text())
"$10"


# it's also possible to modify HTML tree in various ways:
# insert text into selected element:
print(doc('h1').append('<span>discounted</span>'))
"<h1>Product Title<span>discounted</span></h1>"

# or remove elements
doc('p').remove()
print(doc('#product').html())
"""
<h1>Product Title<span>discounted</span></h1>
<span class="price">$10</span>
"""


# pyquery can also retrieve web documents using requests:
doc = pq(url='http://httpbin.org/html', headers={"User-Agent": "webscraping.fyi"})
print(doc('h1').html())

Alternatives / Similar


Was this page helpful?