Comparison of HTML parsers

HTML parsers are software for automated Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) parsing. They have two main purposes:

  • HTML traversal: offer an interface for programmers to easily access and modify of the "HTML string code". Canonical example: DOM parsers.
  • HTML clean: to fix invalid HTML and to improve the layout and indent style of the resulting markup. Canonical example: HTML Tidy.
Parser License Implementation language(s) Latest date* HTML parsing[1] HTML5-compliant parsing Clean HTML** Update HTML***
html.parser Python S. F. L. Python 2015-02-25[2] Yes ? No No
Html Agility Pack Microsoft Public License C# 2016-07-14[3] Yes ? No ?
Beautiful Soup Python S. F. L. Python 2016-08-02[4] Yes Partial[5] Yes Yes
Gumbo Apache License 2.0 C 2015-05-01 Yes Yes ? ?
html5ever Apache License 2.0 Rust 2016-02-23 Yes Yes ? ?
html5lib MIT License Python (and PHP, six years ago) 2016-07-15[6] Yes Yes Yes No
HTML::Parser Perl license Perl 2013-03-28 Yes No[7] ? ?
htmlPurifier GNU Lesser GPL PHP 2009-03-25[8] No No Yes Yes
HTML Tidy W3C license ANSI C 2015-05-24[9] No[10] No Yes[10] Yes[10]
HtmlUnit Apache License 2.0 Java 2016-05-27[11] Yes ? No No
HtmlCleaner BSD License[12] Java 2015-08-24 No No Yes ?
Hubbub MIT License C 2016-02-16 Yes Yes[13] ? ?
Jaunt API Jaunt Beta License Java 2013-08-01 Yes ? Yes No
Jericho HTML Parser Eclipse Public License Java 2012-10-30[14] No?? ? ? ?
jsdom MIT license JavaScript 2013-07-21 No ? ? ?
jsoup MIT license Java 2016-05-17[15] Yes ? Yes Yes
JTidy JTidy License Java 2012-10-09[16] No ? Yes ?
libxml2 HTMLparser MIT License C 2012-09-11[17] Yes No ? ?
NekoHTML Apache License 2.0 Java 2014-06-02[18] No ? ? ?
TagSoup Apache License 2.0 Java 2011-07-07 No ? ? ?
Validator.nu HTML Parser MIT License Java 2012-06-05 Yes Yes ? ?
PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser MIT License PHP 2014-08-28 Yes ? No No
The PHP DOMDocument-class PHP License PHP 2014-10-04 Yes ? No No
Nokogiri MIT License Ruby 2015-01-23[19] Yes ? No No
AVHTML AGPL C++ 2015-08-27[20] Yes ? No Yes
Parser License Implementation language(s) Latest date* HTML Parsing HTML5-compliant Parsing Clean HTML** Update HTML***
* Latest release (of significant changes) date.
** sanitize (generating standard-compatible web-page, reduce spam, etc.) and clean (strip out surplus presentational tags, remove XSS code, etc.) HTML code.
*** Updates HTML4.X to XHTML or to HTML5, converting deprecated tags (ex. CENTER) to valid ones (ex. DIV with style="text-align:center;").

References

  1. ^ 12.2 Parsing HTML documents — HTML Standard
  2. ^ Python 3.4.3
  3. ^ Nuget Html AgilityPack
  4. ^ Beautiful Soup 4.5.1
  5. ^ via html5lib
  6. ^ Releases · html5lib/html5lib-python
  7. ^ Bug #53300 for HTML-Parser: HTML 5
  8. ^ HTML Tidy for Windows
  9. ^ HTML Tidy release 4.9.30
  10. ^ a b c What is Tidy?
  11. ^ HtmlUnit Release 2.22 Changes
  12. ^ HtmlCleaner is distributed under BSD License
  13. ^ according to project's home page
  14. ^ Jericho HTML Parser - Browse /jericho-html/3.3 at SourceForge.net
  15. ^ jsoup release 1.9.2
  16. ^ JTidy - Browse /JTidy at SourceForge.net
  17. ^ libxml2 Releases
  18. ^ NekoHTML | Change History
  19. ^ Nokogiri release 1.6.6.2
  20. ^ Latest commit 8c0d99f on 27 Aug 2015