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cheerio
The fast, flexible & elegant library for parsing and manipulating HTML and XML.
cheerio
The fast, flexible, and elegant library for parsing and manipulating HTML and XML.
import * as cheerio from 'cheerio';
const $ = cheerio.load('<h2 class="title">Hello world</h2>');
$('h2.title').text('Hello there!');
$('h2').addClass('welcome');
$.html();
//=> <html><head></head><body><h2 class="title welcome">Hello there!</h2></body></html>
Installation
Install Cheerio using a package manager like npm, yarn, or bun.
npm install cheerio
# or
bun add cheerio
Features
❤ Proven syntax: Cheerio implements a subset of core jQuery. Cheerio removes all the DOM inconsistencies and browser cruft from the jQuery library, revealing its truly gorgeous API.
ϟ Blazingly fast: Cheerio works with a very simple, consistent DOM model. As a result parsing, manipulating, and rendering are incredibly efficient.
❁ Incredibly flexible: Cheerio wraps around parse5 for parsing HTML and can optionally use the forgiving htmlparser2. Cheerio can parse nearly any HTML or XML document. Cheerio works in both browser and server environments.
API
Loading
First you need to load in the HTML. This step in jQuery is implicit, since jQuery operates on the one, baked-in DOM. With Cheerio, we need to pass in the HTML document.
// ESM or TypeScript:
import * as cheerio from 'cheerio';
// In other environments:
const cheerio = require('cheerio');
const $ = cheerio.load('<ul id="fruits">...</ul>');
$.html();
//=> <html><head></head><body><ul id="fruits">...</ul></body></html>
Selectors
Once you've loaded the HTML, you can use jQuery-style selectors to find elements within the document.
$( selector, [context], [root] )
selector searches within the context scope which searches within the root
scope. selector and context can be a string expression, DOM Element, array
of DOM elements, or cheerio object. root, if provided, is typically the HTML
document string.
This selector method is the starting point for traversing and manipulating the document. Like in jQuery, it's the primary method for selecting elements in the document.
$('.apple', '#fruits').text();
//=> Apple
$('ul .pear').attr('class');
//=> pear
$('li[class=orange]').html();
//=> Orange
Rendering
When you're ready to render the document, you can call the html method on the
"root" selection:
$.root().html();
//=> <html>
// <head></head>
// <body>
// <ul id="fruits">
// <li class="apple">Apple</li>
// <li class="orange">Orange</li>
// <li class="pear">Pear</li>
// </ul>
// </body>
// </html>
If you want to render the
outerHTML
of a selection, you can use the outerHTML prop:
$('.pear').prop('outerHTML');
//=> <li class="pear">Pear</li>
You may also render the text content of a Cheerio object using the text
method:
const $ = cheerio.load('This is <em>content</em>.');
$('body').text();
//=> This is content.
The "DOM Node" object
Cheerio collections are made up of objects that bear some resemblance to browser-based DOM nodes. You can expect them to define the following properties:
tagNameparentNodepreviousSiblingnextSiblingnodeValuefirstChildchildNodeslastChild
Screencasts
This video tutorial is a follow-up to Nettut's "How to Scrape Web Pages with Node.js and jQuery", using cheerio instead of JSDOM + jQuery. This video shows how easy it is to use cheerio and how much faster cheerio is than JSDOM + jQuery.
Cheerio in the real world
Are you using cheerio in production? Add it to the wiki!
Sponsors
Does your company use Cheerio in production? Please consider sponsoring this project! Your help will allow maintainers to dedicate more time and resources to its development and support.
Headlining Sponsors
Other Sponsors
Backers
Become a backer to show your support for Cheerio and help us maintain and improve this open source project.
License
MIT
Other packages similar to cheerio
jsdom
jsdom is a pure-JavaScript implementation of many web standards, notably the WHATWG DOM and HTML Standards. It is more heavyweight than cheerio as it aims to provide a complete browsing environment, but it is useful for more complex scenarios where a full DOM API is needed.
puppeteer
Puppeteer is a Node library which provides a high-level API to control Chrome or Chromium over the DevTools Protocol. It is different from cheerio as it allows for browser automation, including but not limited to DOM manipulation, and is capable of rendering and screenshotting web pages.
FAQs
The fast, flexible & elegant library for parsing and manipulating HTML and XML.
The npm package cheerio receives a total of 12,512,581 weekly downloads. As such, cheerio popularity was classified as popular.
We found that cheerio demonstrated a healthy version release cadence and project activity because the last version was released less than a year ago. It has 2 open source maintainers collaborating on the project.
Package last updated on 23 Jan 2026
Did you know?
Socket for GitHub automatically highlights issues in each pull request and monitors the health of all your open source dependencies. Discover the contents of your packages and block harmful activity before you install or update your dependencies.
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