tl-parser

tl (installed as tl-parser) is a fast HTML parser for Python written in Rust.

It's a python binding library for astral-tl—a maintained fork of the original y21/tl—focused on performance, HTML selector coverage and a stable API.

Installation

Wheels for Python 3.12–3.14 are published to PyPI. Install with:

uv add tl-parser

Quickstart

import tl

dom = tl.parse('<p id="text">Hello</p>')
text = dom.get_element_by_id("text")
assert text.inner_text() == "Hello"

Finding a tag using the query selector API

import tl

dom = tl.parse('<div><img src="cool-image.png" /></div>')
matches = dom.query_selector('img[src]')

if matches:
    img = matches[0]
    print("Found:", img.outer_html())
else:
    print("No matching tag")

Iterating over the subnodes of an HTML document

import tl

dom = tl.parse('<div><img src="cool-image.png" /></div>')

for node in dom.children():
    name = node.name().unwrap_or("(text)")
    print(f"child={name} inner_text={node.inner_text()}")

Working with classes, attributes, and text

import tl

html = '<div class="a"><p class="a b" id="text">Hello</p></div>'
dom = tl.parse(html)

print([el.inner_text() for el in dom.get_elements_by_class_name("a")])
# ['Hello', 'Hello']

p = dom.get_element_by_id("text")
print(p.get_attribute("class"))
# 'a b'

Note: the binding currently exposes read-only DOM access (querying, traversing, serialization). Mutation APIs from the original crate (e.g., changing attributes) are not yet wrapped, but the underlying Rust code supports them if/when we extend the Python surface.

Benchmarks

In our benchmarks, tl-parser parses HTML around 5x faster than the next-fastest parser and is often up to 100x faster for class, ID, and CSS lookups. The chart shows median startup-adjusted time per operation, so lower bars are better. See the benchmark code for the workloads and reproduction instructions.

Contributing

To hack on the binding, let maturin compile the extension from source:

uv run maturin develop

This installs the extension module in editable mode so that import tl picks up local changes. For more background on the project and Python+Rust packaging, see my blog post "Expanding the Python universe with Rust".

License

MIT, inherited from the upstream projects. See LICENSE for details.