parselvsuntangle
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:
parselallows you to modify the contents of an element, remove elements or add new elements to a document. - Support for both HTML and XML:
parselsupports 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.
untangle is a simple library for parsing XML documents in Python. It allows you to access data in an XML file as if it were a Python object, making it easy to work with the data in your code.
To use untangle, you first need to install it via pip by running pip install untangle``.
Once it is installed, you can use theuntangle.parse()`` function to parse an XML file and create a Python object.
For example:
import untangle
obj = untangle.parse("example.xml")
print(obj.root.element.child)
You can also pass a file-like object or a string containing XML data to the untangle.parse() function. Once you have an untangle object, you can access elements in the XML document using dot notation.
You can also access the attributes of an element by using attrib property, eg. `obj.root.element['attrib_name']`` untangle also supports xpath-like syntax to access the elements, obj.root.xpath("path/to/element")
It also supports iteration over the elements using obj.root.element.children
for child in obj.root.element.children:
print(child)
Highlights
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"]
import untangle
obj = untangle.parse("example.xml")
print(obj.root.element.child)
# access attributes:
print(obj.root.element['attrib_name'])
# use xpath:
element = obj.root.xpath("path/to/element")