Audience
Anyone searching for a library to extract data from HTML and XML using XPath and CSS selectors
About parsel
Parsel is a BSD-licensed Python library to extract and remove data from HTML and XML using XPath and CSS selectors, optionally combined with regular expressions. Create a selector object for the HTML or XML text that you want to parse. Then use CSS or XPath expressions to select elements. CSS is a language for applying styles to HTML documents. It defines selectors to associate those styles with specific HTML elements. XPath is a language for selecting nodes in XML documents, which can also be used with HTML. You can use either CSS or XPath. CSS is usually more readable, but some things can only be done with XPath. Being built atop lxml, parsel selectors support some EXSLT extensions and come with pre-registered namespaces to use in XPath expressions. Parsel selectors allow you to chain selectors, so most of the time you can just select by class using CSS and then switch to XPath when needed.
Other Popular Alternatives & Related Software
jsoup
jsoup is a Java library that simplifies working with real-world HTML and XML. It offers an easy-to-use API for URL fetching, data parsing, extraction, and manipulation using DOM API methods, CSS, and XPath selectors. jsoup implements the WHATWG HTML5 specification and parses HTML to the same DOM as modern browsers. With jsoup, you can scrape and parse HTML from a URL, file, or string; find and extract data using DOM traversal or CSS selectors; manipulate HTML elements, attributes, and text; clean user-submitted content against a safelist to prevent XSS attacks; and output tidy HTML. jsoup is designed to deal with all varieties of HTML found in the wild, from pristine and validating to invalid tag-soup, creating a sensible parse tree. For example, you can fetch the Wikipedia homepage, parse it to a DOM, and select the headlines from the "In the news" section into a list of elements.
Learn more
UI-licious
Stop writing brittle tests with hard-coded CSS, XPATH selectors and waits. Write tests that are meaningful to people, effortless to maintain, and reusable. The reason for this is because writing your tests using hard-coded CSS and XPATH selectors is like pouring concrete onto a specific UI implementation. This creates very high-maintenance tests that break at the slightest changes to the UI and are very hard for humans to read. UI-licious uses dynamic code analysis to understand the structure of your website based on the use of semantic HTML and ARIA accessibility attributes, as well as context of the previous commands, to identify which is the intended element to target for every command. This means that even if the HTML code for the UI changes underneath the code, the test is valid as long as the user journey remains the same. That said, your website doesn't to be written perfectly for UI-licious to work.
Learn more
AgentQL
Forget fragile XPath or DOM selectors. AI-powered AgentQL finds elements reliably, even as websites change. Use natural language to find exact elements. Locates web elements by their meaning. Use natural language description instead of fragile XPath and DOM selectors. Get the results in exactly the shape you need. Built to be deterministic in the best way possible. Get started by installing our Chrome extension, your gateway to a seamless web scraping experience. Extract data from websites with ease. Secure your access with a unique API key, your gateway to utilizing the powerful features of AgentQL, ensuring a secure experience across your apps. Dive into the capabilities of AgentQL by writing your first query, a simple way to specify what data or web elements you want to extract from a website. Explore the power of AgentQL SDK to start automating. Quickly gather essential data, boosting analytics and insights.
Learn more
Nightwatch.js
Nightwatch.js is an integrated, easy to use End-to-End testing solution for web applications and websites, written in Node.js. It uses the W3C WebDriver API to drive browsers and perform commands and assertions on DOM elements. Simple but powerful syntax which enables you to write tests very quickly, using Javascript (Node.js) and CSS or Xpath selectors. Typescript is supported as well. Built-in command-line test runner which runs the tests either sequentially or in parallel, with retries and implicit waits. Also supports grouping of test suites and tags. Manages automatically Selenium or WebDriver services (ChromeDriver, GeckoDriver, Edge, Safari) in a separate child process. Fluent and easy to work with Page Object Model support to better organise elements and sections, with support for both CSS or Xpath selectors.
Learn more
Pricing
Starting Price:
Free
Free Version:
Free Version available.
Company Information
Python Software Foundation
United States
pypi.org/project/parsel/
Videos and Screen Captures
Other Useful Business Software
Try Google Cloud Risk-Free With $300 in Credit
Use your credit across every product. Compute, storage, AI, analytics. When it runs out, 20+ products stay free. You only pay when you choose to.
Product Details
Platforms Supported
Windows
Mac
Linux
Training
Documentation
Webinars
Videos
Support
Online
