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**Category:** Ruby\
**Created:** [May 31, 2007, 9:28am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/html-parser-which-one-is-better/105573 "2007-05-31T09:28:42Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 8\
**Page:** 1
**Author:**  [@gsofhon](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/gsofhon)\
**Post date:** [May 31, 2007, 9:28am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/html-parser-which-one-is-better/105573/1 "2007-05-31T09:28:42Z")
I’m new to Ruby and need to parse some web pages. I googled “ruby HTML
parser” and have found several parser avaliable. They all seem good and
I’m wondering which one is better for me since I’ll have to deal with
many pages encoded in different encoding, such UTF-8, GB2312 and GBK(For
Chinese). So please help me. Thanks.
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**Author:**  [@gsofhon](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/gsofhon)\
**Post date:** [May 31, 2007, 9:48am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/html-parser-which-one-is-better/105573/2 "2007-05-31T09:48:29Z")
Hpricot is a good starting point.
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**Author:**  [@gsofhon](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/gsofhon)\
**Post date:** [May 31, 2007, 11:27am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/html-parser-which-one-is-better/105573/3 "2007-05-31T11:27:33Z")
Dick D. wrote:
> Hpricot is a good starting point.
OK, I got it. Thanks a lot.
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**Author:**  [@gsofhon](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/gsofhon)\
**Post date:** [May 31, 2007, 11:37am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/html-parser-which-one-is-better/105573/4 "2007-05-31T11:37:48Z")
On 5/31/07, Dick D. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote:
> Hpricot is a good starting point.
Yeah Hpricot is good, but in general the quality of the Ruby web
scraping
choices is pretty impressive. There are variants that are just built on
top
of Hpricot but provide an even simpler API.
However your second problem is a bit trickier, where you encounter
alternate encodings. To do any kind of real work with multiple code
pages you want to be converting it to unicode (UTF-8) at fetch time.
This isn’t Ruby’s strong point (which is not the same thing as saying
it can’t do it). But there are multiple choices here - running Ruby on
JRuby (Java) just for the seamless unicode/codepage support. Hpricot
is ported to JRuby for instance. I would have a good look at what
Ruby libraries enable explicit code page conversions.
---
**Author:**  [@gsofhon](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/gsofhon)\
**Post date:** [June 1, 2007, 8:15am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/html-parser-which-one-is-better/105573/5 "2007-06-01T08:15:58Z")
On 2007-05-31 02:36:57 -0700, “Richard C.”
[removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) said:
>
I’ve had great success with this. Just make sure you’re using a later
version of Ruby 1.8.5+ (that includes the NKF library) and you should
be fine.
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**Author:**  [@gsofhon](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/gsofhon)\
**Post date:** [June 2, 2007, 7:12am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/html-parser-which-one-is-better/105573/6 "2007-06-02T07:12:13Z")
Thank you all for your help.
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**Author:**  [@gsofhon](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/gsofhon)\
**Post date:** [June 1, 2007, 3:11am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/html-parser-which-one-is-better/105573/7 "2007-06-01T03:11:18Z")
Rubyful soup I like. Its highly simple to use although the construction
of the object from HTML is a bit slower than I’d like. Quite easy to
use.
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**Author:**  [@gsofhon](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/gsofhon)\
**Post date:** [June 2, 2007, 9:35pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/html-parser-which-one-is-better/105573/8 "2007-06-02T21:35:34Z")
I’ve used HPricot, and really like it.