Cookbooks
Rust
Chapter 11. HTML and the Web
Parsing HTML

Rust:
Parsing HTML

How to:

To parse HTML in Rust, you’ll often use the scraper crate, which provides a high-level interface to traverse and manipulate HTML documents.

First, add scraper to your Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
scraper = "0.12.0"

Next, here’s a simple example that extracts all link URLs from a given HTML string:

extern crate scraper;

use scraper::{Html, Selector};

fn main() {
    let html = r#"
    <html>
    <body>
        <a href="http://example.com/1">Link 1</a>
        <a href="http://example.com/2">Link 2</a>
    </body>
    </html>
    "#;

    let document = Html::parse_document(html);
    let selector = Selector::parse("a").unwrap();

    for element in document.select(&selector) {
        let link = element.value().attr("href").unwrap();
        println!("Found link: {}", link);
    }
}

Output:

Found link: http://example.com/1
Found link: http://example.com/2

In this example, we parse a simple HTML document to find all <a> elements and extract their href attributes, effectively printing the URLs of all the links in the document. The scraper library simplifies HTML parsing and selecting specific elements using CSS selectors, making it a go-to for web scraping tasks in Rust.

Downloading a web pageSending an HTTP request