add support for Parsel

[Ehsan-U]

BeautifulSoup lacks proper type hints, mostly Any type, hence not effective IDE autocompletion. A solid alternative is Parsel. It supports CSS selectors, XPath expressions for HTML and XML, JMESPath for JSON documents, and Regex expressions. Additionally, Parsel is the parser used by Scrapy.

[siddiqkaithodu]

I was thinking about selectolax

[Ehsan-U]

selectolax doesn't support XPATH selector nor JMESPath for JSON.

[janbuchar]

We started out with BeautifulSoup because of its popularity, but you're right that it has its shortcomings. Adding support for either selectolax or parsel as a new crawler type should be fairly easy - we'll consider it.

[asymness]

+1 for Parsel

[asymness]

@janbuchar, I'd like to help out by adding Parsel support as a new crawler type. Would you be open to a PR from me for this?

[janbuchar]

@janbuchar, I'd like to help out by adding Parsel support as a new crawler type. Would you be open to a PR from me for this?

Absolutely 🙂