What is cheerio?
Cheerio is a fast, flexible, and lean implementation of core jQuery designed specifically for the server. It allows users to manipulate and traverse HTML documents with a familiar jQuery-like API in a Node.js environment.
What are cheerio's main functionalities?
HTML Parsing
Cheerio can parse HTML and allows you to select and manipulate HTML elements in a way similar to jQuery.
const cheerio = require('cheerio');
const $ = cheerio.load('<h2 class="title">Hello world</h2>');
$('h2.title').text('Hello there!');
$('h2').addClass('welcome');
console.log($.html());
DOM Traversal
Cheerio provides methods to traverse the DOM tree, such as selecting elements by class, id, or tag name.
const cheerio = require('cheerio');
const $ = cheerio.load('<ul id="fruits"><li class="apple">Apple</li><li class="orange">Orange</li></ul>');
$('.apple', '#fruits').text();
$('ul .apple').attr('class');
DOM Manipulation
Cheerio allows you to manipulate the DOM by adding, removing, or modifying elements and their attributes.
const cheerio = require('cheerio');
const $ = cheerio.load('<ul id="fruits"></ul>');
$('#fruits').append('<li>Banana</li>');
$('#fruits').prepend('<li>Apple</li>');
$('#fruits').after('<p>Nothing to see here</p>');
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.
cheerio
The fast, flexible, and elegant library for parsing and manipulating HTML and XML.
中文文档 (Chinese Readme)
import * as cheerio from 'cheerio';
const $ = cheerio.load('<h2 class="title">Hello world</h2>');
$('h2.title').text('Hello there!');
$('h2').addClass('welcome');
$.html();
Installation
npm install 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.
import * as cheerio from 'cheerio';
const cheerio = require('cheerio');
const $ = cheerio.load('<ul id="fruits">...</ul>');
$.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();
$('ul .pear').attr('class');
$('li[class=orange]').html();
Rendering
When you're ready to render the document, you can call the html
method on the
"root" selection:
$.root().html();
If you want to render the
outerHTML
of a selection, you can use the outerHTML
prop:
$('.pear').prop('outerHTML');
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();
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:
tagName
parentNode
previousSibling
nextSibling
nodeValue
firstChild
childNodes
lastChild
Screencasts
https://vimeo.com/31950192
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!
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