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scraplingvsparsel

BSD-3-Clause 7 2 36,206
397.4 thousand (month) Aug 01 2024 0.4.5(2026-04-07 04:22:27 ago)
1,324 8 43 BSD-3-Clause
Jul 26 2019 4.5 million (month) 1.11.0(2026-01-29 07:19:22 ago)

Scrapling is an adaptive web scraping framework for Python that introduces "self-healing" selectors — selectors that can track and find elements even when the website's DOM structure changes. This solves one of the biggest maintenance headaches in web scraping: broken selectors after website updates.

Key features include:

  • Self-healing selectors Scrapling uses smart element matching that can identify target elements even after the page structure changes. It builds a fingerprint of the element based on multiple attributes (text, position, siblings, attributes) and uses fuzzy matching to relocate it.
  • Multiple parsing backends Supports different parsing engines including lxml (fast) and a custom engine, allowing you to choose the right balance of speed and features.
  • Scrapy-like Spider API Provides a familiar Spider class pattern for organizing crawling logic, similar to Scrapy but with the added benefit of adaptive selectors.
  • CSS and XPath selectors Full support for CSS selectors and XPath, plus the adaptive matching system on top.
  • Type hints and modern Python Built with full type annotations and 92% test coverage for reliability.
  • Async support Supports asynchronous crawling for efficient concurrent scraping.

Scrapling gained massive traction in 2025 as one of the most starred new Python scraping libraries. It is particularly useful for scraping targets that frequently update their HTML structure, where traditional selector-based scrapers would break.

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-selectorsxpathfastpopular
css-selectorsxpath-selectors

Example Use


```python from scrapling import Fetcher, StealthFetcher, PlayWrightFetcher # Simple fetching with adaptive parsing fetcher = Fetcher() page = fetcher.get("https://example.com/products") # CSS selectors work as expected products = page.css(".product-card") for product in products: name = product.css_first(".name").text() price = product.css_first(".price").text() print(f"{name}: {price}") # Adaptive selector - finds the element even if DOM changes # Uses element fingerprinting for resilient matching element = page.find("Product Title", auto_match=True) # Stealth fetching with anti-bot bypass stealth = StealthFetcher() page = stealth.get("https://protected-site.com") # Playwright-based fetching for JS-rendered pages pw = PlayWrightFetcher() page = pw.get("https://spa-example.com", headless=True) ```
```python from parsel import Selector # this is our HTML page: html = """ Hello World!

Product Title

paragraph 1

paragraph2

$10
""" 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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