Floki is a simple HTML parser that enables search for nodes using CSS selectors.
Take this HTML as an example:
<!doctype html>
<html>
<body>
<section id="content">
<p class="headline">Floki</p>
<span class="headline">Enables search using CSS selectors</span>
<a href="https://github.com/philss/floki">Github page</a>
<span data-model="user">philss</span>
</section>
<a href="https://hex.pm/packages/floki">Hex package</a>
</body>
</html>Here are some queries that you can perform (with return examples):
{:ok, document} = Floki.parse_document(html)
Floki.find(document, "p.headline")
# => [{"p", [{"class", "headline"}], ["Floki"]}]
document
|> Floki.find("p.headline")
|> Floki.raw_html
# => <p class="headline">Floki</p>Each HTML node is represented by a tuple like:
{tag_name, attributes, children_nodes}
Example of node:
{"p", [{"class", "headline"}], ["Floki"]}
So even if the only child node is the element text, it is represented inside a list.
Add Floki to your mix.exs:
defp deps do
[
{:floki, "~> 0.34.0"}
]
endAfter that, run mix deps.get.
You can check the changelog for changes.
Floki needs the :leex module in order to compile.
Normally this module is installed with Erlang in a complete installation.
If you get this "module :leex is not available" error message, you need to install the erlang-dev and erlang-parsetools packages in order get the :leex module. The packages names may be different depending on your OS.
By default Floki uses a patched version of mochiweb_html for parsing fragments
due to its ease of installation (it's written in Erlang and has no outside dependencies).
However one might want to use an alternative parser due to the following concerns:
- Performance - It can be up to 20 times slower than the alternatives on big HTML documents.
- Correctness - in some cases
mochiweb_htmlwill produce different results from what is specified in HTML5 specification. For example, a correct parser would parse<title> <b> bold </b> text </title>as{"title", [], [" <b> bold </b> text "]}since content inside<title>is to be treated as plaintext. Albeitmochiweb_htmlwould parse it as{"title", [], [{"b", [], [" bold "]}, " text "]}.
Floki supports the following alternative parsers:
fast_html- A wrapper for lexbor. A pure C HTML parser.html5ever- A wrapper for html5ever written in Rust, developed as a part of the Servo project.
fast_html is generally faster, according to the
benchmarks conducted by
its developers.
You can perform a benchmark by running the following:
$ sh benchs/extract.sh
$ mix run benchs/parse_document.exs
Extracting the files is needed only once.
This dependency is written with a NIF using Rustler, but you don't need to install anything to compile it thanks to RustlerPrecompiled.
defp deps do
[
{:floki, "~> 0.34.0"},
{:html5ever, "~> 0.14.0"}
]
endRun mix deps.get and compiles the project with mix compile to make sure it works.
Then you need to configure your app to use html5ever:
# in config/config.exs
config :floki, :html_parser, Floki.HTMLParser.Html5everNotice that you can pass the HTML parser as an option in parse_document/2 and parse_fragment/2.
A C compiler, GNU\Make and CMake need to be installed on the system in order to compile lexbor.
First, add fast_html to your dependencies:
defp deps do
[
{:floki, "~> 0.34.0"},
{:fast_html, "~> 2.0"}
]
endRun mix deps.get and compiles the project with mix compile to make sure it works.
Then you need to configure your app to use fast_html:
# in config/config.exs
config :floki, :html_parser, Floki.HTMLParser.FastHtmlTo parse a HTML document, try:
html = """
<html>
<body>
<div class="example"></div>
</body>
</html>
"""
{:ok, document} = Floki.parse_document(html)
# => {:ok, [{"html", [], [{"body", [], [{"div", [{"class", "example"}], []}]}]}]}To find elements with the class example, try:
Floki.find(document, ".example")
# => [{"div", [{"class", "example"}], []}]To convert your node tree back to raw HTML (spaces are ignored):
document
|> Floki.find(".example")
|> Floki.raw_html
# => <div class="example"></div>To fetch some attribute from elements, try:
Floki.attribute(document, ".example", "class")
# => ["example"]You can get attributes from elements that you already have:
document
|> Floki.find(".example")
|> Floki.attribute("class")
# => ["example"]If you want to get the text from an element, try:
document
|> Floki.find(".headline")
|> Floki.text
# => "Floki"Here you find all the CSS selectors supported in the current version:
| Pattern | Description |
|---|---|
| * | any element |
| E | an element of type E |
| E[foo] | an E element with a "foo" attribute |
| E[foo="bar"] | an E element whose "foo" attribute value is exactly equal to "bar" |
| E[foo~="bar"] | an E element whose "foo" attribute value is a list of whitespace-separated values, one of which is exactly equal to "bar" |
| E[foo^="bar"] | an E element whose "foo" attribute value begins exactly with the string "bar" |
| E[foo$="bar"] | an E element whose "foo" attribute value ends exactly with the string "bar" |
| E[foo*="bar"] | an E element whose "foo" attribute value contains the substring "bar" |
| E[foo|="en"] | an E element whose "foo" attribute has a hyphen-separated list of values beginning (from the left) with "en" |
| E:nth-child(n) | an E element, the n-th child of its parent |
| E:nth-last-child(n) | an E element, the n-th child of its parent, counting from bottom to up |
| E:first-child | an E element, first child of its parent |
| E:last-child | an E element, last child of its parent |
| E:nth-of-type(n) | an E element, the n-th child of its type among its siblings |
| E:nth-last-of-type(n) | an E element, the n-th child of its type among its siblings, counting from bottom to up |
| E:first-of-type | an E element, first child of its type among its siblings |
| E:last-of-type | an E element, last child of its type among its siblings |
| E:checked | An E element (checkbox, radio, or option) that is checked |
| E:disabled | An E element (button, input, select, textarea, or option) that is disabled |
| E.warning | an E element whose class is "warning" |
| E#myid | an E element with ID equal to "myid" (for ids containing periods, use #my\\.id or [id="my.id"]) |
| E:not(s) | an E element that does not match simple selector s |
| :root | the root node or nodes (in case of fragments) of the document. Most of the times this is the html tag |
| E F | an F element descendant of an E element |
| E > F | an F element child of an E element |
| E + F | an F element immediately preceded by an E element |
| E ~ F | an F element preceded by an E element |
There are also some selectors based on non-standard specifications. They are:
| Pattern | Description |
|---|---|
| E:fl-contains('foo') | an E element that contains "foo" inside a text node |
| E:fl-icontains('foo') | an E element that contains "foo" inside a text node (case insensitive) |
- @arasatasaygin for Floki's logo from the Open Logos project.
Copyright (c) 2014 Philip Sampaio Silva
Floki is under MIT license. Check the LICENSE file for more details.