selectolax
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:
selectolax.html.fromstring()from selectolax.parser import HTMLParser
html_string = "<html><body>Hello, World!</body></html>"
root = HTMLParser(html_string).root
print(root.tag) # html
with file-like objects, bytes or file paths,
as well asselectolax.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 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