What is HTML parsing?

TL;DR

HTML parsing transforms raw markup into a structured DOM tree that code can query. Parsers tokenize HTML, build element hierarchies, and handle malformed markup. This enables scrapers to use CSS selectors instead of fragile string manipulation.

What is HTML parsing?

Parsing reads HTML text and converts it into structured data. A parser identifies tags, attributes, and nesting to build a tree where each element becomes a queryable node. Without parsing, finding a product price means searching character sequences—an approach that breaks with any markup change.

Parsing creates the initial DOM; JavaScript rendering goes further by executing scripts that modify the DOM. Libraries like BeautifulSoup and Cheerio handle parsing, but web scraping APIs like Olostep abstract this entirely—send a URL, receive clean extracted content without writing parsing code.

Key Takeaways

HTML parsing converts markup into structured DOM trees for reliable element selection. Good parsers handle malformed HTML gracefully. Olostep handles parsing, rendering, and extraction in a single call—no parsing libraries needed.