How parsing fits into scraping
After a page is fetched, a parser reads the HTML document object model (DOM) and pulls out targeted elements using selectors like CSS paths or XPath. The parsed output is then mapped to a clean schema — for example, converting a product page into fields like name, price, and availability.
Common parsing tools
Popular parsing libraries include BeautifulSoup and lxml for Python, and Cheerio for Node.js. Managed scraping platforms typically maintain custom parsers per site so extraction stays accurate even as a target site’s layout changes.
