pyqueryvsxmltodict

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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.

xmltodict is a Python library that allows you to work with XML data as if it were JSON. It allows you to parse XML documents and convert them to dictionaries, which can then be easily manipulated using standard dictionary operations.

You can also use the library to convert a dictionary back into an XML document. xmltodict is built on top of the popular lxml library and provides a simple, intuitive API for working with XML data.

Note that despite using lxml conversion speeds can be quite slow for large XML documents and in web scraping this should be used to parse specific snippets instead of whole HTML documents.

xmltodict pairs well with JSON parsing tools like jmespath or jsonpath. Alternatively, it can be used in reverse mode to parse JSON documents using HTML parsing tools like CSS selectors and XPath.

It can be installed via pip by running pip install xmltodict command.

Highlights

css-selectors

Example Use

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())

import xmltodict

xml_string = """
<book>
    <title>The Great Gatsby</title>
    <author>F. Scott Fitzgerald</author>
    <publisher>Charles Scribner's Sons</publisher>
    <publication_date>1925</publication_date>
</book>
"""

book_dict = xmltodict.parse(xml_string)
print(book_dict)
{'book': {'title': 'The Great Gatsby',
'author': 'F. Scott Fitzgerald',
'publisher': "Charles Scribner's Sons",
'publication_date': '1925'}}

# and to reverse:
book_xml = xmltodict.unparse(book_dict)
print(book_xml)

# the xml can be loaded and parsed using parsel or beautifulsoup:
from parsel import Selector
sel = Selector(book_xml)
print(sel.css('publication_date::text').get())
'1925'