floki: An Elixir repository from lbighetti

Floki is a simple HTML parser that enables search for nodes using CSS selectors.

Usage

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):

Floki.find(html, "p.headline")
# => [{"p", [{"class", "headline"}], ["Floki"]}]


Floki.find(html, "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.

You can write a simple HTML crawler with Floki and HTTPoison:

html
|> Floki.find(".pages a")
|> Floki.attribute("href")
|> Enum.map(fn(url) -> HTTPoison.get!(url) end)

It is simple as that!

Installation

Add Floki to your mix.exs:

defp deps do
  [
    {:floki, "~> 0.20.0"}
  ]
end

After that, run mix deps.get.

Dependencies

Floki needs the leex module in order to compile. Normally this module is installed with Erlang in a complete installation.

If you get this kind of error, 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.

Optional - Using html5ever as the HTML parser

You can configure Floki to use html5ever as your HTML parser. This is recommended if you need better performance and a more accurate parser. However html5ever is being under active development and may be unstable.

Since it's written in Rust, we need to install Rust and compile the project. Luckily we have the html5ever Elixir NIF that makes the integration very easy.

You still need to install Rust in your system. To do that, please follow the instruction presented in the official page.

Installing html5ever

After setup Rust, you need to add html5ever NIF to your dependency list:

defp deps do
  [
    {:floki, "~> 0.20.0"},
    {:html5ever, "~> 0.7.0"}
  ]
end

Run 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.Html5ever

After that you are able to use html5ever as your HTML parser with Floki.

For more info, check the article Rustler - Safe Erlang and Elixir NIFs in Rust.

More about Floki API

To parse a HTML document, try:

html = """
  <html>
  <body>
    <div class="example"></div>
  </body>
  </html>
"""

Floki.parse(html)
# => {"html", [], [{"body", [], [{"div", [{"class", "example"}], []}]}]}

To find elements with the class example, try:

Floki.find(html, ".example")
# => [{"div", [{"class", "example"}], []}]

To convert your node tree back to raw HTML (spaces are ignored):

Floki.find(html, ".example")
|> Floki.raw_html
# =>  <div class="example"></div>

To fetch some attribute from elements, try:

Floki.attribute(html, ".example", "class")
# => ["example"]

You can get attributes from elements that you already have:

Floki.find(html, ".example")
|> Floki.attribute("class")
# => ["example"]

If you want to get the text from an element, try:

Floki.find(html, ".headline")
|> Floki.text

# => "Floki"

Supported selectors

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: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: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.warning	an E element whose class is "warning"
E#myid	an E element with ID equal to "myid"
E:not(s)	an E element that does not match simple selector s
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

Special thanks

@arasatasaygin for Floki's logo from the Open Logos project.

License

Floki is under MIT license. Check the LICENSE file for more details.

lbighetti/floki