Unstructured-IO / Unstructured-IO/unstructured

Replace BeautifulSoup with Scrapling's parser

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enhancement
Dominant language
HTML
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Description

Hi, I like your project, and I use it, but I see you are still using BeautifulSoup. Well, actually, there's a better, faster new parser now: Scrapling.

Scrapling is up to 1735 times faster than BS4 with html5lib and up to 698 times faster than BS4 with Lxml, as benchmarks show below, while using significantly less memory. While analyzing memory usage with memray for another library I use, I noticed that BeautifulSoup consumes more than 7 MB during import alone.

Image

While Scrapling uses 1.5 MB in the same task, plus importing. Scrapling's parser is built on lxml

However, Scrapling doesn't provide only ways to select elements using CSS/XPATH selectors; it also offers new options, such as selecting elements by their text content using lateral search or regular expressions, and a find function similar to BS's, but more powerful and much faster.

Also, Scrapling automatically handles invalid/incomplete HTML through lxml.
Here's an article that shows every function in BeautifulSoup with its equivalent in Scrapling to make the migration easy: https://scrapling.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tutorials/migrating_from_beautifulsoup/

Also, if that interests you, it provides a way to make self-healing spiders that adapt to website design changes without AI, and it gives a method for finding elements similar to those found, as the AutoScraper library does. Still, it's way faster and better at this.

Here are two benchmarks from the documentation that compare it to all Python libraries in the market:

Text Extraction Speed Test (5000 nested elements)
# Library Time (ms) vs Scrapling
1 Scrapling 1.92 1.0x
2 Parsel/Scrapy 1.99 1.036x
3 Raw Lxml 2.33 1.214x
4 PyQuery 20.61 ~11x
5 Selectolax 80.65 ~42x
6 BS4 with Lxml 1283.21 ~698x
7 MechanicalSoup 1304.57 ~679x
8 BS4 with html5lib 3331.96 ~1735x
Element Similarity & Text Search Performance
Library Time (ms) vs Scrapling
Scrapling 1.87 1.0x
AutoScraper 10.24 5.476x

It would be a solid addition to unstructured, what do you think?

I'm the author of Scrapling, so you might think I'm biased towards my library, but that's not true —you can see for yourself.
If you need any changes to make this happen, please let me know.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

No source file, entry point, or test is named. Start by locating all BeautifulSoup usage in the repository, then review Scrapling's migration guide and assess compatibility with the existing document-parsing behavior; done means the replacement is integrated without regressions.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
python
Domain
data
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Quiet
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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