cheerio-select

What is cheerio-select?

The cheerio-select npm package is a library that allows users to use CSS selectors to select and manipulate HTML elements within a cheerio instance. It is designed to work with the cheerio library, which is a fast, flexible, and lean implementation of core jQuery designed specifically for the server.

What are cheerio-select's main functionalities?

Selecting elements

This feature allows you to select HTML elements using CSS selectors. In the code sample, we select elements with the class 'apple' and log their text content.

const cheerio = require('cheerio');
const select = require('cheerio-select');
const html = '<ul id="fruits"><li class="apple">Apple</li><li class="orange">Orange</li></ul>';
const $ = cheerio.load(html);
const elements = select('.apple', $);
console.log($(elements).text()); // 'Apple'

Filtering elements

This feature allows you to filter a set of elements down to those that match a CSS selector. In the code sample, we filter a list of 'li' elements to only those with the class 'apple'.

const cheerio = require('cheerio');
const select = require('cheerio-select');
const html = '<ul id="fruits"><li class="apple">Apple</li><li class="orange">Orange</li></ul>';
const $ = cheerio.load(html);
const fruits = $('li').toArray();
const apples = select.filter('.apple', fruits, $);
console.log($(apples).text()); // 'Apple'

Other packages similar to cheerio-select

jsdom

jsdom is a pure-JavaScript implementation of many web standards, notably the WHATWG DOM and HTML Standards, for use with Node.js. It is more comprehensive than cheerio-select as it simulates a web browser's environment, allowing for dynamic content execution, but it is also heavier and slower.

jquery

Although jQuery is primarily used in the browser, it can be used in Node.js with a window provided by a package like jsdom. jQuery offers a wide range of features for DOM manipulation and traversal, similar to cheerio-select, but it is not as optimized for server-side usage.

puppeteer

Puppeteer is a Node library which provides a high-level API to control Chrome or Chromium over the DevTools Protocol. It is typically used for browser automation, testing, and scraping. Unlike cheerio-select, Puppeteer operates on a full browser and is capable of rendering JavaScript, making it more powerful but also more resource-intensive.

README

cheerio-select

CSS selector engine supporting jQuery selectors, based on css-select.

Supports all jQuery positional pseudo-selectors:

• :first
• :last
• :eq
• :nth
• :gt
• :lt
• :even
• :odd
• :not(:positional), where :positional is any of the above.

This library is a thin wrapper around css-select. Only use this module if you will actually use jQuery positional selectors.