From: Timothy Goddard <interfecus@...>
Date: 2007-01-13T22:15:13+09:00
Subject: Re: Performance comparison between screen scrapers

Conrad Chu wrote:
> Does anyone know how the following screen scrapers perform against one
> another?
>
> * ScrAPI
> * RubyfulSoup
> * HTree
> * Hpricot
>
> I'm trying to write up a tool where a person enters in a URL, and I use
> an AJAX call to scrape the contents of that URL for title, description,
> etc.  So speed is really important (I suppose, regular expressions would
> be the fastest, but I need something that is tree-based and supports
> HTML tidying)
>
> Thanks
> Conrad
>
> --
> Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.

I haven't used them all but Hpricot is fast (the parser is written in C
with Ragel), error tolerant and perfect for this task. Take a look at
its website for a guide on how to use it.