HTML-parser on Node.js [closed]

Question

Is there something like Ruby's nokogiri on nodejs? I mean a user-friendly HTML-parser.

I'd seen on Node.js modules page some parsers, but I can't find something pretty and fresh.

Mephitis

What do you mean by "friendly"? Convenient to work and select nodes with, like Nokogiri's XPath and CSS selector support? Amenable to parsing invalid "tag soup" HTML? – Transition

If you are comfortable with jQuery, consider this answer. – Ion

Answer 1

If you want to build DOM you can use jsdom.

There's also cheerio, it has the jQuery interface and it's a lot faster than older versions of jsdom, although these days they are similar in performance.

You might wanna have a look at htmlparser2, which is a streaming parser, and according to its benchmark, it seems to be faster than others, and no DOM by default. It can also produce a DOM, as it is also bundled with a handler that creates a DOM. This is the parser that is used by cheerio.

parse5 also looks like a good solution. It's fairly active (11 days since the last commit as of this update), WHATWG-compliant, and is used in jsdom, Angular, and Polymer.

If the website you're trying to scrape is dynamic then you should be using a headless browser like phantomjs. Also have a look at casperjs, if you're considering phantomjs. And you can control casperjs from node with SpookyJS.

Beside phantomjs there's zombiejs. Unlike phantomjs that cannot be embedded in nodejs, zombiejs is just a node module.

There's a nettuts+ toturial for the latter solutions.

Meteoroid

You can get DOM from htmlparser2 using DomHandler module (bundled with htmlparser2). They are separated on purpose to allow for other kinds of processing HTML without overhead of creating DOM. – Spense

@Spense Thanks, Before I thought it was non-standard DOM, I changed that section accordingly. – Meteoroid

I'm not sure how you YQL for crawling - it's more for joining web service results not processing markup. – Togo

@Togo You are right, crawling is not the right term. I changed it with scraping :) – Meteoroid

@Farid - (would've just messaged you if I could) at the risk of debating in comments (sorry!) I still don't see how you use it for scraping. It works with web services not sites, and with wservices, you're rarely parsing html. Maybe xml, but not html. – Togo

Well it's like YQL(the webservice) does the hard work(fetching and parsing) for you. For example you want to find some stackoverflow questions: You can either use cheerio and request: request('stackoverflow.com', function (err, body) { console.log(cheerio.load(body)('.question-hyperlink')) }; or use YQL: yql('select * from data.html.cssselect where url="stackoverflow.com" and css=".question-hyperlink"', function (err, results) { console.log(results); }). The latter will use way less of your system resources. – Meteoroid

Answer 2

Try https://github.com/tmpvar/jsdom - you give it some HTML and it gives you a DOM.

Bezel

Answer 3

You can also take a look at x-ray: https://github.com/lapwinglabs/x-ray

Counterglow