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scrapy
parsel
Python2016–2025
scrapy / parsel

parsel

Parsel lets you extract data from XML/HTML documents using XPath or CSS selectors

Web DevelopmentProductivityAutomation & Workflows
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
4Distinct people
5Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
1.4KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Parsel lets you extract data from XML/HTML documents using XPath or CSS selectors

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 3:38:16 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year5 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2016-02-05 13:33:52 UTC to 2025-03-29 02:13:01 UTC.

0122016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20162017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments20202021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2025

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

2 sources
kmike84·Feb 26, 2018
:thumbs up: A second iteration of review: * encoding detection from <meta> tags doesn't normalize encodings - Python doesn't use the same names as HTML; * I'm still not sure encoding detection is correct, as it is unclear what are priorities in the current implementation. It should be 1) Content-Type header; 2) BOM marks; 3) encoding in meta tags (or xml declared encoding if you support it); 4) content-based guessing - chardet, etc., or just a default value. I.e. encoding in meta should have less priority than Content-Type header, but more priority than chardet, and if I understand it properly, response.text is decoded both using Content-Type header and chardet. * lxml's fromstring handles XML (XHTML) encoding declarations, and it may fail in case of unicode data (http://lxml.de/parsing.html#python-unicode-strings), so passing response.te
Read the rest
xt to fromstring is not good. At the same time, relying on lxml to detect encoding is not enough, as http headers should have a higher priority. In parsel we're re-encoding text to utf8, and forcing utf8 parser for lxml to solve it: https://github.com/scrapy/parsel/blob/f6103c8808170546ecf046.... * when extracting links, it is not enough to use raw @href attribute values, as they are allowed to have leading and trailing whitespaces (see https://github.com/scrapy/w3lib/blob/c1a030582ec30423c40215f...) * absolute_links doesn't look correct for base urls which contain path. It also may have issues with urls like tel:1122333, or mailto:. For encoding detection we're using https://github.com/scrapy/w3lib/blob/c1a030582ec30423c40215f... in Scrapy. It works well overall; its weakness is that it doesn't require a HTML tree, and doesn't parse it, extracting meta information only from first 4Kb using a regex (4Kb limit is not good). Other than that, it does all the right things AFAIK.
In Requests-HTML: HTML Parsing for Humans

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