From: why the lucky stiff <ruby-talk@...>
Date: 2006-07-04T14:28:45+09:00
Subject: [ANN] Hpricot 0.1 -- quick, cinchy HTML parsing

Associates worldwide, here is some unpolished software for you.  You'll need a
compiler to install this one and the `iconv' library installed.

  gem install hpricot --source code.whytheluckystiff.net

Hpricot is a fast HTML parser, based on HTree.  I converted the HTree scanner to
C and I'm just now reworking the parser.  I've also started adding a bunch of
nice methods to HTree so that you won't have any desire to use REXML objects
instead.

  doc = File.open(path) { |f| Hpricot.parse(f) }

  # supports xpath
  doc.search("//p/a").set("href", "http://google.com")

  # supports css selectors
  doc.search("#menu .box").each { |ele| p ele }

  # slash is a shortcut
  (doc/"#menu box").each ...

  # symbols also imply css selectors of tag names
  (doc/:p/:a).set("href", "http://google.com")

The Hpricot scanner uses Ragel (the same state machine used by Mongrel) and is
able to whip through hundreds of HTML documents in a second.  (I'm benchmarking
against the sizeable Boing Boing home page, Slashdot, and others.)  However,
this release still includes some of HTree's existing code, which slows things
down quite a bit and will be phased out over the next few releases.

Anyway, I have high hopes for this little guy.  Please don't forget to say the
name right.  It's H-pricot.  Like: AYYCHH-pricot.

Subversion is here: http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/svn/hpricot/trunk.

Gracias, mi rubistos!

_why