In Rust, you can use various libraries to handle XML parsing for web scraping. One of the most popular and comprehensive libraries for XML handling is xml-rs. It provides a streaming XML parser that works similarly to the standard library's XmlReader.
Here's an example of how to use xml-rs to parse XML data in Rust:
First, add xml-rs to your Cargo.toml:
[dependencies]
xml-rs = "0.8"
Then, use xml-rs to parse XML in your Rust code:
use xml::reader::{EventReader, XmlEvent};
fn main() {
let xml_data = r#"
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<items>
<item>
<name>Item 1</name>
<price>10.00</price>
</item>
<item>
<name>Item 2</name>
<price>20.00</price>
</item>
</items>
"#;
let parser = EventReader::from_str(xml_data);
for e in parser {
match e {
Ok(XmlEvent::StartElement { name, attributes, .. }) => {
println!("Start element: {}", name);
for attr in attributes {
println!("Attribute: {}={}", attr.name, attr.value);
}
}
Ok(XmlEvent::Characters(s)) => {
println!("Characters: {}", s);
}
Ok(XmlEvent::EndElement { name }) => {
println!("End element: {}", name);
}
Err(e) => {
println!("Error: {}", e);
break;
}
_ => {}
}
}
}
This example sets up an XML parser using xml-rs and iterates through the XML events. For each event, it matches on the type of event (start element, characters, end element, etc.) and handles it accordingly. For web scraping purposes, you would typically look for specific tags that contain the data you're interested in and process the text within those tags.
If you are looking to scrape websites that serve XML or XHTML, you might also be interested in a more general scraping library that can handle both HTML and XML. In that case, scraper might be a good choice. It's built on top of html5ever and selectors libraries and provides a convenient way to parse and query HTML/XML documents using CSS selectors.
To use scraper, add it to your Cargo.toml:
[dependencies]
scraper = "0.12"
Here's a basic example of using scraper to parse XHTML:
use scraper::{Html, Selector};
fn main() {
let xhtml_data = r#"
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<body>
<div class="item">
<h2>Item 1</h2>
<p>Price: $10.00</p>
</div>
<div class="item">
<h2>Item 2</h2>
<p>Price: $20.00</p>
</div>
</body>
</html>
"#;
let document = Html::parse_document(xhtml_data);
let selector = Selector::parse(".item").unwrap();
for element in document.select(&selector) {
let title = element.select(&Selector::parse("h2").unwrap()).next().unwrap().text().collect::<Vec<_>>();
let price = element.select(&Selector::parse("p").unwrap()).next().unwrap().text().collect::<Vec<_>>();
println!("Title: {}, Price: {}", title.join(""), price.join(""));
}
}
In this example, scraper is used to parse an XHTML snippet using CSS selectors. The code looks for all elements with the class item, then extracts and prints the text from the h2 and p tags within each item.
Remember that web scraping can be subject to legal and ethical considerations, so ensure that you have the right to scrape the content and that you're complying with the website's terms of service and robots.txt file.
