Compare parsel vs. jsoup

Parsel is a Python library licensed under BSD that facilitates the extraction and removal of data from HTML and XML documents using XPath and CSS selectors, with the option to integrate regular expressions. To begin, you create a selector object for the HTML or XML content you wish to analyze. After that, you can utilize either CSS or XPath expressions to target specific elements. CSS serves as a styling language for HTML, defining selectors that link styles to designated HTML elements, while XPath is utilized for selecting nodes within XML documents and can also be applied to HTML. Although both CSS and XPath can be used, CSS tends to offer greater readability, whereas XPath provides capabilities that may not be achievable through CSS alone. Built on top of lxml, parsel selectors incorporate some EXSLT extensions and come with pre-registered namespaces available for use in XPath queries. Furthermore, parsel selectors allow for the chaining of selectors, enabling users to primarily select by class using CSS and seamlessly transition to XPath when the situation demands it, enhancing flexibility in data extraction tasks. This dual capability makes parsel a powerful tool for developers working with web data.

jsoup is a Java library that streamlines the process of working with HTML and XML in real-world applications. It provides a user-friendly API for fetching URLs, parsing data, extracting information, and manipulating it through DOM API methods, CSS selectors, and XPath queries. By adhering to the WHATWG HTML5 specification, jsoup ensures that the HTML it parses is transformed into a DOM structure comparable to that used by modern web browsers. This library enables users to scrape and parse HTML from various sources, such as URLs, files, or strings; locate and extract information using DOM traversal or CSS selectors; modify HTML elements, attributes, and text; and sanitize user-generated content to safeguard against XSS vulnerabilities while producing clean HTML output. jsoup is adept at handling the diverse spectrum of HTML encountered online, ranging from well-formed and valid to messy, non-compliant tag-soup, resulting in a coherent parse tree. For instance, one can retrieve the homepage of Wikipedia, parse it into a DOM structure, and extract the headlines featured in the "In the news" section, organizing them into a list of elements for further use. This flexibility makes jsoup an invaluable tool for developers who need to interact with web content efficiently.