What are some common HTML, XML, and JSON parsing and manipulation libraries or tools?

1 HTML parsers

HTML parsers are tools that can read and interpret HTML documents, which are composed of tags, attributes, and content. These parsers can extract information from HTML documents, such as the title, the links, the images, or the text. Additionally, they can be used to modify or generate HTML documents by adding, removing, or changing tags, attributes, or content. Some of the most popular HTML parsers include Beautiful Soup (a Python library), Jsoup (a Java library), and HTML Agility Pack (a .NET library). All of these libraries have a simple and flexible interface that allows for navigation, searching and modification of the document tree. Moreover, they feature powerful and expressive syntaxes for selecting and manipulating elements using CSS selectors, DOM traversal, and manipulation methods. Finally, they are capable of handling malformed or invalid HTML documents.

2 XML parsers

XML parsers are tools that can read and interpret XML documents, which are composed of elements, attributes, and content. They enable you to extract information from documents, such as the names, values, or namespaces of elements or attributes. Additionally, they can modify or generate XML documents by adding, removing, or changing elements, attributes, or content. Common XML parsers include SAX, DOM and StAX. SAX is a standard interface for event-based XML parsing that is fast and memory-efficient but requires more coding. DOM is a standard interface for tree-based XML parsing that allows you to access and manipulate any part of the document but consumes more memory and resources. Lastly, StAX is a standard interface for stream-based XML parsing that provides an iterator or cursor to access different parts of the document and gives more control to the programmer over the parsing process.

3 JSON parsers

JSON parsers are tools that can read and interpret JSON data, which are composed of objects, arrays, and values. These parsers can convert JSON data into native data structures such as dictionaries, lists, or arrays in various languages. Additionally, they can also convert native data structures into JSON data. Examples of common JSON parsers include the Python module JSON that can encode and decode JSON data with various types of Python objects like strings, numbers, booleans, lists, or dictionaries. Jackson is a Java library that can read and write JSON data with various types of Java objects like primitives, collections, maps, or beans. Newtonsoft.Json is a .NET library that can read and write JSON data with various types of .NET objects like primitives, collections, dictionaries, or dynamic objects. It also has settings such as formatting, converters, contract resolvers, or reference handling.

4 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?