parselvsrequests-html

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1.3 million (month) Jul 26 2019 1.9.1(3 months ago)

13,615 2 222 MIT

Feb 25 2018 1.1 million (month) 0.10.0(5 years ago)

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.

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

Highlights

css-selectorsxpath-selectors

Example Use

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"]

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)