Readme for HandsomeSoup-0.1

HandsomeSoup

Current Status: very very pre-alpha. Usable but buggy.

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 is easier to work with HTML.

Most importantly, it adds CSS selectors to HXT. The goal of HandsomeSoup is to be a complete CSS2 parser for HXT (it is very close to this right now).

Example

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

main = do
    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

doc <- fromUrl "http://example.com"

Or a local page using parseHtml

contents <- readFile [filename]
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 "#container h1"
doc <<< css "img[width]"
doc <<< css "img[width=400]"
doc <<< css "a[class~=bar]"

Easily get attributes using (!)

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