HTML Parsers

A curated collection of the best libraries and tools for parsing HTML and extracting structured data from web page markup.

Quick answer

Choose an HTML parser by runtime and parsing model. Cheerio is the JavaScript default for jQuery-style selectors, lxml is the Python speed and XPath choice, BeautifulSoup is the forgiving Python scripting option, htmlparser2 fits streaming Node pipelines, and parse5 fits browser-accurate HTML5 behavior.

Related guides

Best Open-Source Web Scrapers

Top picks in HTML Parsers

Cheerio
JavaScript default
Fits JavaScript extraction code that wants a familiar jQuery-style API over static server-side HTML.
BeautifulSoup
Python scripts
Fits Python scripts that need forgiving HTML and XML parsing with a readable navigation and search API.
lxml
Python + XPath
Fits Python teams that need fast HTML and XML parsing, XPath support, and a parser used underneath many scraping libraries.
Goquery
Go services
Fits Go scrapers that want jQuery-like selection while staying close to the standard net/html tokenizer.
htmlparser2
Streaming Node
Fits Node pipelines that need lower-level streaming, event-driven parsing for large or incremental HTML inputs.
parse5
HTML5 accuracy
Fits tooling that needs browser-style HTML5 parsing behavior rather than a lightweight selector wrapper.

Requests-HTML

Python Requests With HTML Parsing

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13.8K
Forks
999
Last commit
2 years ago

Python library combining HTTP requests, HTML parsing, CSS selectors, and optional JavaScript rendering for scraping workflows.

pyquery

jQuery-Style HTML Parsing For Python

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2.4K
Forks
184
Last commit
4 months ago

Python library that applies a jQuery-style API to HTML and XML documents for selection, traversal, and extraction.

AutoScraper

Example-Based HTML Extraction For Python

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7.5K
Forks
764
Last commit
last year

Python library that learns simple scraping rules from example values and extracts similar data from HTML pages.

Parsel

Extract Web Data Cleanly With Python

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1.3K
Forks
162
Last commit
22 days ago

A Python library for extracting data from HTML, XML, and JSON with CSS, XPath, JMESPath, and regex.

jsoup

Parse Real-World HTML In Java

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11.4K
Forks
2.3K
Last commit
22 days ago

A Java library for parsing real-world HTML into a standards-based DOM with CSS selectors and DOM traversal.

selectolax

Fast HTML Parsing for Python Workflows

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1.6K
Forks
91
Last commit
last month

Parse HTML with CSS selectors in Python using a fast, MIT-licensed library built for large-scale extraction.

lxml

Fast XML And HTML Parsing For Python

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3K
Forks
619
Last commit
22 days ago

A fast Python library for parsing XML and HTML, often used as a foundation for scraping and data tools.

BeautifulSoup

Python library for parsing HTML and XML

Stars
204
Forks
57
Last commit
3 years ago

Beautiful Soup is a Python library for pulling data out of HTML and XML files, providing Pythonic idioms for navigating and searching parse trees.

parse5

HTML5 spec-compliant parser for Node.js

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3.9K
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251
Last commit
5 months ago

parse5 is the fastest spec-compliant HTML5 parser for Node.js, parsing HTML exactly as modern browsers do.

htmlparser2

The fast and forgiving HTML/XML parser

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4.8K
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394
Last commit
5 months ago

htmlparser2 is the fastest Node.js HTML and XML parser, offering a streaming, event-driven API with a forgiving approach to malformed markup.

Goquery

jQuery-like HTML parsing for Go

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14.9K
Forks
930
Last commit
6 months ago

GoQuery brings jQuery-like syntax to Go for parsing and manipulating HTML documents, making web scraping in Go intuitive and efficient.

Cheerio

Fast, flexible HTML parsing and manipulation for JS

Stars
30K
Forks
1.7K
Last commit
5 months ago

Cheerio is the industry-standard JavaScript library for parsing and manipulating HTML and XML using a familiar jQuery-like syntax.