requests-htmlvsselectolax

MIT 228 2 13,748

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

1,173 1 23 MIT

Mar 01 2018 342.4 thousand (month) 0.3.26(29 days ago)

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

selectolax is a fast and lightweight library for parsing HTML and XML documents in Python. It is designed to be a drop-in replacement for the popular BeautifulSoup library, with significantly faster performance.

selectolax uses a Cython-based parser to quickly parse and navigate through HTML and XML documents. It provides a simple and intuitive API for working with the document's structure, similar to BeautifulSoup.

To use selectolax, you first need to install it via pip by running pip install selectolax``. Once it is installed, you can use theselectolax.html.fromstring()function to parse an HTML document and create a selectolax object. For example:

from selectolax.parser import HTMLParser

html_string = "<html><body>Hello, World!</body></html>"
root = HTMLParser(html_string).root
print(root.tag) # html


You can also use

selectolax.html.fromstring()

with file-like objects, bytes or file paths, 
as well as

selectolax.xml.fromstring()`` for parsing XML documents.

Once you have a selectolax object, you can use the select() method to search for elements in the document using CSS selectors, similar to BeautifulSoup. For example:

body = root.select("body")[0]
print(body.text()) # "Hello, World!"

Like BeautifulSoups find and find_all methods selectolax also supports searching using the search()`` method, which returns the first matching element, and thesearch_all()`` method, which returns all matching elements.

Example Use

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)

from selectolax.parser import HTMLParser

html_string = "<html><body>Hello, World!</body></html>"
root = HTMLParser(html_string).root
print(root.tag) # html

# use css selectors:
body = root.select("body")[0]
print(body.text()) # "Hello, World!"

# find first matching element:
body = root.search("body")
print(body.text()) # "Hello, World!"

# or all matching elements:
html_string = "<html><body><p>paragraph1</p><p>paragraph2</p></body></html>"
root = HTMLParser(html_string).root
for el in root.search_all("p"):
  print(el.text()) 
# will print:
# paragraph 1
# paragraph 2