HandsomeSoup

Current Status: Usable and stable. Needs GHC 7.6. Please file bugs!

HandsomeSoup is the library I wish I had when I started parsing HTML in Haskell.

It is built on top of HXT and adds a few functions that make it easier to work with HTML.

Most importantly, it adds CSS selectors to HXT. The goal of HandsomeSoup is to be a complete CSS2 selector parser for HXT.

Install

cabal install HandsomeSoup

Example

Nokogiri, the HTML parser for Ruby, has an example showing how to scrape Google search results. This is easy in HandsomeSoup:

main = do
    let doc = fromUrl "http://www.google.com/search?q=egon+schiele"
    links <- runX $ doc >>> css "h3.r a" ! "href"
    mapM_ putStrLn links

What can HandsomeSoup do for you?

Easily parse an online page using fromUrl

let doc = fromUrl "http://example.com"

Or a local page using parseHtml

contents <- readFile [filename]
let doc = parseHtml contents

Easily extract elements using css

Here are some valid selectors:

doc <<< css "a"
doc <<< css "*"
doc <<< css "a#link1"
doc <<< css "a.foo"
doc <<< css "p > a"
doc <<< css "p strong"
doc <<< css "#container h1"
doc <<< css "img[width]"
doc <<< css "img[width=400]"
doc <<< css "a[class~=bar]"
doc <<< css "a:first-child"

Easily get attributes using (!)

doc <<< css "img" ! "src"
doc <<< css "a" ! "href"

Docs

Find Haddock docs on Hackage.

I also wrote The Complete Guide To Parsing HXT With Haskell.