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What are the distinctions in scraping between BeautifulSoup's lxml and html5lib parsers?

asked 2023-06-07 07:51:28 +0000

djk gravatar image

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answered 2023-06-07 08:13:02 +0000

bukephalos gravatar image

The main distinctions between BeautifulSoup's lxml and html5lib parsers are as follows:

  1. Speed: The lxml parser is generally faster than the html5lib parser for parsing HTML documents. This is because lxml is a lower-level parser that uses C libraries for parsing documents, while html5lib is a pure Python parser.

  2. Parsing behavior: The lxml parser is more lenient in its parsing behavior, which means that it may be able to parse slightly malformed HTML documents that the html5lib parser would reject. However, this leniency can also lead to unexpected behavior if the document is very malformed.

  3. Compliance: The html5lib parser is designed to parse HTML documents to the full HTML5 specification, while the lxml parser may not fully support all HTML5 features.

  4. Memory usage: The html5lib parser uses more memory than the lxml parser, which can be an issue for very large HTML documents.

  5. Output format: The lxml parser returns a parsed document as an ElementTree object, which can be manipulated using Python's built-in ElementTree library. The html5lib parser returns a parsed document as a tree of BeautifulSoup objects. This can be more convenient for certain types of parsing tasks, but may be less flexible in other cases.

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Asked: 2023-06-07 07:51:28 +0000

Seen: 8 times

Last updated: Jun 07 '23