parsel vs. Scrapy vs. jsoup vs. python-sql Comparison Chart

Parsel is a BSD-licensed Python library to extract and remove data from HTML and XML using XPath and CSS selectors, optionally combined with regular expressions. Create a selector object for the HTML or XML text that you want to parse. Then use CSS or XPath expressions to select elements. CSS is a language for applying styles to HTML documents. It defines selectors to associate those styles with specific HTML elements. XPath is a language for selecting nodes in XML documents, which can also be used with HTML. You can use either CSS or XPath. CSS is usually more readable, but some things can only be done with XPath. Being built atop lxml, parsel selectors support some EXSLT extensions and come with pre-registered namespaces to use in XPath expressions. Parsel selectors allow you to chain selectors, so most of the time you can just select by class using CSS and then switch to XPath when needed.

jsoup is a Java library that simplifies working with real-world HTML and XML. It offers an easy-to-use API for URL fetching, data parsing, extraction, and manipulation using DOM API methods, CSS, and XPath selectors. jsoup implements the WHATWG HTML5 specification and parses HTML to the same DOM as modern browsers. With jsoup, you can scrape and parse HTML from a URL, file, or string; find and extract data using DOM traversal or CSS selectors; manipulate HTML elements, attributes, and text; clean user-submitted content against a safelist to prevent XSS attacks; and output tidy HTML. jsoup is designed to deal with all varieties of HTML found in the wild, from pristine and validating to invalid tag-soup, creating a sensible parse tree. For example, you can fetch the Wikipedia homepage, parse it to a DOM, and select the headlines from the "In the news" section into a list of elements.