From: Peter Szinek <peter@...>
Date: 2006-11-22T16:53:47+09:00
Subject: Re: Hpricot/Rubyful Soup comparison

Wes Gamble wrote:
> Has anyone done a head to head comparison of Hpricot and Rubyful Soup 
> (both HTML parsers)?
> 
> If so, would you be willing to comment on which one a) is faster for an 
> average sized HTML page and 
I did not do any benchmarks, but I am scraping a lot of relatively big
pages on a daily basis and I can tell you, RubyfulSoup is magnitudes
slower than HPricot. I am absolutely sure about this. I am doing things
with HPricot which should be extremely slow (e.g. traversing the whole
tree and doing expensive operations on all Hpricot::Elements) yet
HPricot is surprisingly fast. Rubyful is nowhere near.

b) preserves the original HTML better.
Hmm this I don't know, but I guess the term 'preserves HTML better'
should be defined first with some metrics or something ( deviance from
the HTML standard? ). There are a lot of so badly formed HTML pages,
than even a human would come up with multiple solutions for their
correction.

I think the only real-life quality meter is to process your pages with
both of them and see which one yields better results. I did not play too
much with RubyfulSoup but I am writing a quite serious screen scraping
framework based on Hpricot, and so far I had no real problems - and I am
doing every kind of weird things.

Cheers,
Peter

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