Scalpel is a web scraping library inspired by libraries like Parsec and Perl's Web::Scraper. Scalpel builds on top of TagSoup to provide a declarative and monadic interface.
There are two general mechanisms provided by this library that are used to build web scrapers: Selectors and Scrapers.
Selectors describe a location within an HTML DOM tree. The simplest selector,
that can be written is a simple string value. For example, the selector
"div" matches every single div node in a DOM. Selectors can be combined
using tag combinators. The // operator to define nested relationships within a
DOM tree. For example, the selector "div" // "a" matches all anchor tags
nested arbitrarily deep within a div tag.
In addition to describing the nested relationships between tags, selectors can
also include predicates on the attributes of a tag. The @: operator creates a
selector that matches a tag based on the name and various conditions on the
tag's attributes. An attribute predicate is just a function that takes an
attribute and returns a boolean indicating if the attribute matches a criteria.
There are several attribute operators that can be used to generate common
predicates. The @= operator creates a predicate that matches the name and
value of an attribute exactly. For example, the selector "div" @: ["id" @= "article"] matches div tags where the id attribute is equal to "article".
Scrapers are values that are parameterized over a selector and produce a value
from an HTML DOM tree. The Scraper type takes two type parameters. The first
is the string like type that is used to store the text values within a DOM tree.
Any string like type supported by Text.StringLike is valid. The second type
is the type of value that the scraper produces.
There are several scraper primitives that take selectors and extract content from the DOM. Each primitive defined by this library comes in two variants: singular and plural. The singular variants extract the first instance matching the given selector, while the plural variants match every instance.
Complete examples can be found in the examples folder in the scalpel git repository.
The following is an example that demonstrates most of the features provided by
this library. Supposed you have the following hypothetical HTML located at
"http://example.com/article.html" and you would like to extract a list of all
of the comments.
<html>
<body>
<div class='comments'>
<div class='comment container'>
<span class='comment author'>Sally</span>
<div class='comment text'>Woo hoo!</div>
</div>
<div class='comment container'>
<span class='comment author'>Bill</span>
<img class='comment image' src='http://example.com/cat.gif' />
</div>
<div class='comment container'>
<span class='comment author'>Susan</span>
<div class='comment text'>WTF!?!</div>
</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>
The following snippet defines a function, allComments, that will download
the web page, and extract all of the comments into a list:
type Author = String
data Comment
= TextComment Author String
| ImageComment Author URL
deriving (Show, Eq)
allComments :: IO (Maybe [Comment])
allComments = scrapeURL "http://example.com/article.html" comments
where
comments :: Scraper String [Comment]
comments = chroots ("div" @: [hasClass "container"]) comment
comment :: Scraper String Comment
comment = textComment <|> imageComment
textComment :: Scraper String Comment
textComment = do
author <- text $ "span" @: [hasClass "author"]
commentText <- text $ "div" @: [hasClass "text"]
return $ TextComment author commentText
imageComment :: Scraper String Comment
imageComment = do
author <- text $ "span" @: [hasClass "author"]
imageURL <- attr "src" $ "img" @: [hasClass "image"]
return $ ImageComment author imageURL