Assembly Line

Parsel

Parsel lets you extract data from XML/HTML documents using XPath or CSS selectors

Parsel is an open-source libraries and runtimes project on GitHub under the BSD-3-Clause license (permissive), with 1.4k stars. It is built with CPython. Its last push was 4 days ago.

Stars
1.4k
License
BSD-3-Clause
Activity
Active
Latest release
v1.11.0

Code on GitHub

Judgement

What it is
Building block
What it does
A Python library that extracts data from HTML, XML and JSON using CSS selectors, XPath, JMESPath and regular expressions; it is the selector engine inside Scrapy.
Adopt it when
You want Scrapy's selector API in your own scraping code without the rest of Scrapy.
Watch out
It only extracts data; fetching pages and handling JavaScript-rendered sites is up to you.
Ready for
Production-ready
Runs as
Library
Built with
Python and lxml
How established
Established: started 11 years ago, latest release v1.11.0.
What the license allows
You can build it into a product you sell, as long as you keep its copyright notice.

Judged on 2026-11-06 from the project's README and GitHub data. The license and age lines are worked out directly.

Built from

CPython

Follow it down: Parsel → CPython → GCC → LLVM project → runs on a microchip

How compilers were built, back to punched paper tape

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Stars, license and activity come from GitHub and refresh on a rolling hourly schedule. The project's own description is quoted as written.