Comparison of HTML parsers

HTML parsers are software for automated Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) parsing. They have two main purposes:

• HTML traversal: offer an interface for programmers to easily access and modify of the "HTML string code". Canonical example: DOM parsers.
• HTML clean: to fix invalid HTML and to improve the layout and indent style of the resulting markup. Canonical example: HTML Tidy.

Parser	License	Implementation language(s)	Latest date*	HTML parsing[1]	Clean HTML**	Update HTML***
html.parser	Python S. F. L.	Python	2015-02-25[2]	Yes	No	No
Html Agility Pack	Microsoft Public License	C#	2014-09-16[3]	Yes	No	?
Beautiful Soup (base on lxml and html5lib)[4]	Python S. F. L.	Python	2015-07-03	Yes	Yes	Yes
Gumbo	Apache License 2.0	C	2013-08-13	Yes	?	?
html5lib	MIT License	Python (and PHP, six years ago)	2013-12-23[5]	Yes	Yes	No
HTML::Parser	Perl license	Perl	2013-03-28	Yes[6]	?	?
htmlPurifier	GNU Lesser GPL	PHP	2009-03-25[7]	No	Yes	Yes
HTML Tidy	W3C license	ANSI C	2015-05-24[8]	No[9]	Yes[10]	Yes[11]
HtmlUnit	Apache License 2.0	Java	2.15 / June 2, 2014	Yes	No	No
HtmlCleaner	BSD License[12]	Java	2015-08-24	No	Yes	?
Hubbub	MIT License	C	2013-04-19	Yes	?	?
Jaunt API	Jaunt Beta License	Java	2013-08-01	Yes	Yes	No
Jericho HTML Parser	Eclipse Public License	Java	2012-10-30[13]	No??	?	?
jsdom	MIT license	JavaScript	2013-07-21	No	?	?
jsoup	MIT license	Java	2016-04-16[14]	Yes	Yes	Yes
JTidy	JTidy License	Java	2012-10-09[15]	No	Yes	?
libxml2 HTMLparser	MIT License	C	2012-09-11[16]	Yes	?	?
NekoHTML	Apache License 2.0	Java	2014-06-02[17]	No	?	?
TagSoup	Apache License 2.0	Java	2011-07-07	No	?	?
Validator.nu HTML Parser	MIT License	Java	2012-06-05	Yes	?	?
PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser	MIT License	PHP	2014-08-28	Yes	No	No
The PHP DOMDocument-class	PHP License	PHP	2014-10-04	Yes	No	No
Nokogiri	MIT License	Ruby	2015-01-23[18]	Yes	No	No
AVHTML	AGPL	C++	2015-07-17	Yes	No	Yes
Parser	License	Implementation language(s)	Latest date*	HTML Parsing	Clean HTML**	Update HTML***

* Latest release (of significant changes) date.

** sanitize (generating standard-compatible web-page, reduce spam, etc.) and clean (strip out surplus presentational tags, remove XSS code, etc.) HTML code.

*** Updates HTML4.X to XHTML or to HTML5, converting deprecated tags (ex. CENTER) to valid ones (ex. DIV with style="text-align:center;").

References

1. 12.2 Parsing HTML documents — HTML Standard
2. Python 3.4.3
3. Nuget Html AgilityPack
4. http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/
5. Releases · html5lib/html5lib-python
6. Bug #53300 for HTML-Parser: HTML 5
7. HTML Tidy for Windows
8. HTML Tidy release 4.9.30
9. What is Tidy?
10. What is Tidy?
11. What is Tidy?
12. HtmlCleaner is distributed under BSD License
13. Jericho HTML Parser - Browse /jericho-html/3.3 at SourceForge.net
14. jsoup release 1.9.1
15. JTidy - Browse /JTidy at SourceForge.net
16. libxml2 Releases
17. NekoHTML | Change History
18. Nokogiri release 1.6.6.2