goquery - a little like that j-thing, only in Go
GoQuery brings a syntax and a set of features similar to jQuery to the Go language. It is based on the experimental html package and the CSS Selector library cascadia. Since the experimental html parser returns tokens (nodes), and not a full-featured DOM object, jQuery's manipulation and modification functions have been left off (no point in modifying data in the parsed tree of the HTML, it has no effect).
Supported functions are query-oriented features (hasClass()
, attr()
and the likes), as well as traversing functions that make sense given what we have to work with. This makes GoQuery a great library for scraping web pages.
Syntax-wise, it is as close as possible to jQuery, with the same function names when possible, and that warm and fuzzy chainable interface. jQuery being the ultra-popular library that it is, I felt that writing a similar HTML-manipulating library was better to follow its API than to start anew (in the same spirit as Go's fmt
package), even though some of its methods are less than intuitive (looking at you, index()...).
Installation
Since this library (and cascadia) depends on the experimental branch, this package must be installed first. Both GoQuery and Cascadia expect to find the experimental library with the "exp/html"
import statement. To install it at this location, please follow this guide.
Once this is done, install GoQuery:
go get github.com/PuerkitoBio/goquery
To run unit tests, run this command in goquery's source directory ($GOPATH/src/github.com/PuerkitoBio/goquery
):
go test
To run benchmarks, run this command in goquery's source directory:
go test -bench=".*"
Changelog
- v0.2.0 : Add support for negative indices in Slice(). BREAKING CHANGE
Document.Root
is removed, Document
is now a Selection
itself (a selection of one, the root element, just like Document.Root
was before). Add jQuery's Closest() method. - v0.1.1 : Add benchmarks to use as baseline for refactorings, refactor Next...() and Prev...() methods to use the new html package's linked list features (Next/PrevSibling, FirstChild). Good performance boost (40+% in some cases).
- v0.1.0 : Initial release.
API
GoQuery exposes two classes, Document
and Selection
. Unlike jQuery, which is loaded as part of a DOM document, and thus acts on its containing document, GoQuery doesn't know which HTML document to act upon. So it needs to be told, and that's what the Document
class is for. It holds the root document node as the initial Selection object to manipulate.
jQuery often has many variants for the same function (no argument, a selector string argument, a jQuery object argument, a DOM element argument, ...). Instead of exposing the same features in GoQuery as a single method with variadic empty interface arguments, I use statically-typed signatures following this naming convention:
- When the jQuery equivalent can be called with no argument, it has the same name as jQuery for the no argument signature (e.g.:
Prev()
), and the version with a selector string argument is called XxxFiltered()
(e.g.: PrevFiltered()
) - When the jQuery equivalent requires one argument, the same name as jQuery is used for the selector string version (e.g.:
Is()
) - The signatures accepting a jQuery object as argument are defined in GoQuery as
XxxSelection()
and take a *Selection
object as argument (e.g.: FilterSelection()
) - The signatures accepting a DOM element as argument in jQuery are defined in GoQuery as
XxxNodes()
and take a variadic argument of type *html.Node
(e.g.: FilterNodes()
) - Finally, the signatures accepting a function as argument in jQuery are defined in GoQuery as
XxxFunction()
and take a function as argument (e.g.: FilterFunction()
)
GoQuery's complete godoc reference documentation can be found here.
Please note that Cascadia's selectors do NOT necessarily match all supported selectors of jQuery (Sizzle). See the cascadia project for details.
Examples
Taken from example_test.go:
import (
"fmt"
"strconv"
)
func ExampleScrape_MetalReview() {
var doc *Document
var e error
if doc, e = NewDocument("http://metalreview.com"); e != nil {
panic(e.Error())
}
doc.Find(".slider-row:nth-child(1) .slider-item").Each(func(i int, s *Selection) {
var band, title string
var score float64
band = s.Find("strong").Text()
title = s.Find("em").Text()
if score, e = strconv.ParseFloat(s.Find(".score").Text(), 64); e != nil {
fmt.Printf("Review %d: %s - %s.\n", i, band, title)
} else {
fmt.Printf("Review %d: %s - %s (%2.1f).\n", i, band, title, score)
}
})
}
License
The BSD 3-Clause license, the same as the Go language. Cascadia's license is here.