HTML Matcher

The pypi package in Python contains a series of functions for calculating the similarity ratio between pages in websites or web applications.

How to INSTALL?

pip install html-matcher

How to USE?

By comparing the HTML structure, style, or both, the similarity ratio can be computed. Two techniques are available for structure comparison: Matching Subsequences (MS) and All Path Tree Edit Distance (APTED). One algorithm that uses the jaccard similarity metric is offered for style comparison.

Structure

MS

Example

ms = MatchingSubsequences()
ratio = ms.similarity(page1,page2)

or you can use our improved method of MS that provides better results

ms = MatchingSubsequencesOptimized()
ratio = ms.similarity(page1,page2)

APTED

Example

apted = AllPathTreeEditDistance()
ratio = apted.similarity(page1,page2)

or you can use our improved method of APTED that reduces computational time

apted = AllPathTreeEditDistanceOptimized()
ratio = apted.similarity(page1,page2)

Style

Each html document's css classes are extracted, and the jaccard similarity of the sets of classes is calculated.

Jaccard Similarity

J(A,B) = |A ∩ B| / |A U B|

Example

style = StyleSimilarity()
ratio = style.similarity(page1,page2)

Structure & Style

We must pass a weight for each metric when combining similarity measures (k). The default value is 0.5, but in our experiments, we found that, when comparing web pages based on their similarity ratio, structure takes precedence over style, so 0.7 produces better results.

k * similarity(page_1, page_2) + (1 - k) * similarity(page_1, page_2)

Example

style = StyleSimilarity()
apted = AllPathTreeEditDistanceOptimized()
method = MixedSimilarity(apted, style, k=0.7)
ratio = method.similarity(page1,page2)