astral-html

A high-performance HTML parser designed for document traversal.

[!WARNING]

This README was written by a human, but all code changes, PR summaries, and additional documentation were authored entirely by GPT-6 Astra in Codex.

Benchmarks

Link extraction

Parse HTML, collect owned href, title, and rel attributes from links, and drop the output (astral_html::Reader).

Parser	iniconfig	Bootstrap dashboard	Rust Book	PEP 8	PEP index
astral-html	5.70	31.20	146.30	301.01	1,116.75
tl	14.75	52.31	219.28	454.03	1,766.79
html5gum	14.99	95.35	394.40	870.56	2,914.33
lol_html	17.08	65.32	284.96	527.90	2,857.74
scraper	66.81	399.16	1,589.29	3,193.92	11,346.75

Times in microseconds (µs); lower is better.

Document construction

Parse HTML into each library's native document and drop it (astral_html::Document).

Parser	iniconfig	Bootstrap dashboard	Rust Book	PEP 8	PEP index
astral-html	5.46	35.41	147.94	325.13	1,024.94
tl	8.23	48.86	192.51	394.16	1,124.35
scraper	63.11	378.35	1,570.03	3,090.82	9,958.86

Times in microseconds (µs); lower is better.

Example usage

Use Document to traverse elements and extract text and attributes, or Reader to process HTML as a stream of tokens.

For example, to extract links from a document:

use astral_html::Document;

let source = r#"<a href="/guide">Read the guide</a>"#;
let document = Document::parse(source)?;

for element in document.elements().filter(|element| element.is("a")) {
    if let Some(href) = element.attribute("href") {
        println!("{}: {}", element.text(), href.value());
    }
}

To extract link URLs without building a document, use Reader:

use astral_html::{Reader, Token};

let source = r#"<a href="/guide">Read the guide</a>"#;

for token in Reader::new(source) {
    if let Token::StartTag(tag) = token
        && tag.name == "a"
        && let Some(href) = tag.attributes.iter().find(|attr| attr.name == "href")
    {
        println!("{}", href.value());
    }
}

License

astral-html is licensed under either of

Apache License, Version 2.0, (LICENSE-APACHE or https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

at your option.