---
A fast HTML5 parser with CSS selectors, written in Cython, using the [Lexbor](https://github.com/lexbor/lexbor) engine.
---
[](https://pypi.org/project/selectolax)
[](https://pepy.tech/projects/selectolax)
[](https://github.com/rushter/selectolax/actions/workflows/pythonpackage.yml?query=branch%3Amaster+event%3Apush)
[](https://github.com/rushter/selectolax/blob/master/LICENSE)
---
## Installation
From PyPI using pip:
```bash
pip install selectolax
```
If installation fails due to compilation errors, you may need to install [Cython](https://github.com/cython/cython):
```bash
pip install selectolax[cython]
```
This usually happens when you try to install an outdated version of selectolax on a newer version of Python.
Development version from GitHub:
```bash
git clone --recursive https://github.com/rushter/selectolax
cd selectolax
pip install -r requirements_dev.txt
python setup.py install
```
How to compile selectolax while developing:
```bash
make clean
make dev
```
## Basic examples
Here are some basic examples to get you started with selectolax:
Parsing HTML and extracting text:
```python
from selectolax.lexbor import LexborHTMLParser
html = """
Hi there
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.
"""
tree = LexborHTMLParser(html)
print(tree.css_first('h1#title').text())
# 'Hi there'
print(tree.css_first('h1#title').attributes)
# {'id': 'title', 'data-updated': '20201101'}
print([node.text() for node in tree.css('.post')])
# ['Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. ',
# 'Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.']
```
### Using advanced CSS selectors
```python
from selectolax.lexbor import LexborHTMLParser
html = ""
selector = "div > :nth-child(2n+1):not(:has(a))"
for node in LexborHTMLParser(html).css(selector):
print(node.attributes, node.text(), node.tag)
print(node.parent.tag)
print(node.html)
# {'id': 'p1'} p
# div
#
# {'id': 'p5'} text p
# div
# text
```
#### Using `lexbor-contains` CSS pseudo-class to match text
```python
from selectolax.lexbor import LexborHTMLParser
html = ""
parser = LexborHTMLParser(html)
# Case-insensitive search
results = parser.css('p:lexbor-contains("awesome" i)')
# Case-sensitive search
results = parser.css('p:lexbor-contains("AwesOme")')
assert len(results) == 1
assert results[0].text() == "lexbor is AwesOme"
```
* [More examples](https://selectolax.readthedocs.io/en/latest/examples.html)
## Simple Benchmark
* Extract title, links, scripts and a meta tag from main pages of top 754 domains. See `examples/benchmark.py` for more information.
| Package | Time |
|-------------------------------|-----------|
| Beautiful Soup (html.parser) | 61.02 sec.|
| lxml / Beautiful Soup (lxml) | 9.09 sec. |
| html5_parser | 16.10 sec.|
| selectolax (Lexbor) | 2.39 sec. |
## Links
* [Changelog](CHANGES.md)
* [selectolax API reference and examples](https://selectolax.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html)
* [Video introduction to web scraping using selectolax](https://youtu.be/HpRsfpPuUzE)
* [How to Scrape 7k Products with Python using selectolax and httpx](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpGvq755J2U)
* [Lexbor benchmark](https://lexborisov.github.io/benchmark-html-parsers/)
* [Python benchmark](https://rushter.com/blog/python-fast-html-parser/)
* [Another Python benchmark](https://www.peterbe.com/plog/selectolax-or-pyquery)
* [Universal interface to lxml and selectolax](https://github.com/lorien/domselect)
## License
* lexbor engine — [Apache-2.0 license](https://github.com/lexbor/lexbor?tab=Apache-2.0-1-ov-file#readme)
* selectolax - [MIT](https://github.com/rushter/selectolax/blob/master/LICENSE)
## Contributors
Thanks to all the contributors of selectolax!
