From: Luciano Ramalho <ramalho@...>
Date: 2006-11-22T18:12:09+09:00
Subject: Re: Hpricot/Rubyful Soup comparison

On 11/22/06, Peter Szinek <peter@rubyrailways.com> wrote:
> 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.

HPricot is partially written in C, so it should be faster than a
pure-Ruby lib like RubyfulSoup.

Also, RubyfulSoup aims to be very resilient to malformed markup, so it
must resort to heuristics that have a performance cost. I don't know
fow HPricot handles  HTML or XML with really serious flaws like tags
that open but never close and so on, but in my experience RubyfulSoup
has managed to deal amazingly well with such problems. If you need to
parse low quality markup, the performance penalty of RubyfulSoup may
be well worth the price.

Cheers,

Luciano