Comparison of HTML parsers

On this page

List article

HTML parsers are software for automated Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) parsing. They have two main purposes:

HTML traversal: offer an interface for programmers to easily access and modify the "HTML string code". Canonical example: DOM parsers.
HTML clean: to fix invalid HTML and to improve the layout and indent style of the resulting markup. Canonical example: HTML Tidy.

Parser	License	Implementation language(s)	Latest date*	HTML parsing	HTML5-compliant parsing	Clean HTML**	Update HTML***
HTML Tidy	W3C license	ANSI C	2021-07-17	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
HtmlUnit	Apache License 2.0	Java	2023-10-31	Yes	?	No	No
Beautiful Soup	MIT License	Python	2023-04-07	Yes	Yes	?	No
jsoup	MIT License	Java	2025-04-29	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Parser	License	Implementation language(s)	Latest date*	HTML Parsing	HTML5-compliant Parsing	Clean HTML**	Update HTML***

* Latest release (of significant changes) date. ** sanitize (generating standard-compatible web-page, reduce spam, etc.) and clean (strip out surplus presentational tags, remove XSS code, etc.) HTML code. *** Updates HTML4.X to XHTML or to HTML5, converting deprecated tags (ex. CENTER) to valid ones (ex. DIV with style="text-align:center;").

References

12.2 Parsing HTML documents — HTML Standard Archived 2013-01-16 at the Wayback Machine https://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/parsing.html ↩
HTML Tidy release 5.8.0 https://github.com/htacg/tidy-html5/releases/tag/5.8.0 ↩
What is Tidy? http://www.html-tidy.org/#what_is_tidy ↩
What is Tidy? http://www.html-tidy.org/#what_is_tidy ↩
HtmlUnit 3.7.0 https://github.com/HtmlUnit/htmlunit/releases/tag/3.7.0 ↩
Beautiful Soup release 4.10 https://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/bs4/download/4.12/ ↩
jsoup Java HTML Parser release 1.20.1 https://jsoup.org/news/release-1.20.1 ↩