Stories from the Web Crawling trenches in XML parsing

What is the fastest XML parser in Python?

Author: Mohan Ganesan

Date: Feb 5, 2024

Choosing the right XML parsing library is crucial for performance. lxml is the fastest option, taking only 0.35 seconds compared to over 2 seconds with xml.etree.ElementTree. It's well worth the extra setup.

What is the alternative to BeautifulSoup in Python?

Author: Mohan Ganesan

Date: Feb 5, 2024

BeautifulSoup is a popular Python library for parsing HTML, but there are alternatives like XML parsing, html.parser, and regular expressions.

Can BeautifulSoup parse XML?

Author: Mohan Ganesan

Date: Feb 5, 2024

Beautiful Soup is a Python library for parsing HTML and XML documents. It can parse XML documents with some limitations. For more advanced XML capabilities, consider using Python's built-in XML libraries or third-party libraries like lxml.

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