A functional HTML scraping and manipulation library for OCaml with CSS selector support.
Lambda Soup is a functional HTML scraping and manipulation library for OCaml that allows developers to parse, query, and modify HTML and XML documents. It provides CSS selector support and functional combinators for easy data extraction and transformation, solving the problem of web scraping and document processing in a type-safe, functional environment.
OCaml developers needing to scrape websites, extract content from HTML/XML, or programmatically manipulate document structures for data processing or automation tasks.
Developers choose Lambda Soup for its simplicity, functional design, and robust CSS selector support, offering a lightweight alternative to browser-based parsers with automatic encoding detection and UTF-8 conversion.
Functional HTML scraping and rewriting with CSS in OCaml
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Supports all CSS selectors that make sense outside a browser, with browser-inspired extensions, enabling precise element querying as detailed in the README.
Provides familiar combinators like filter, map, and fold, aligning with OCaml's functional style for easy data processing, as emphasized in the Philosophy section.
Based on Markup.ml, it automatically detects character encodings and converts to UTF-8, simplifying international content scraping without manual intervention.
Can parse and manipulate both HTML and XML via Markup.ml integration, offering flexibility for various document types, as noted under XML Compatibility.
Offers straightforward functions for wrapping, replacing, or inserting elements, making document transformations easy, demonstrated in the mutation example.
Currently in 0.x.x with breaking changes in minor versions, requiring careful dependency management as admitted in the 'Depending' section.
Setup requires OCaml and opam, which can be a barrier for developers not in this ecosystem, as seen in the non-trivial 'Starting from scratch' instructions.
Limited to static HTML/XML parsing; cannot handle dynamic content from JavaScript-rendered pages, a common gap in modern web scraping.
Documentation assumes OCaml proficiency with few tutorials, potentially steepening the learning curve despite the simple API design.