html_parse: Parse HTML

In zuhtml: Parse 'HTML' with a Bundled 'Gumbo' Parser

Parse HTML

Description

html_parse() parses one string or raw vector of HTML the way a browser does: omitted end tags, unquoted attributes, character references and misnested elements are repaired by the HTML parsing algorithm, never rejected. html_read() reads and parses one file, URL or connection.

Usage

html_parse(
  x,
  encoding = NULL,
  base_url = NULL,
  comments = TRUE,
  limits = html_limits()
)

html_read(path, ...)

Arguments

x	One string, or a raw vector of encoded bytes.
encoding	The encoding of raw input, as a name iconv() accepts; NULL to use a byte-order mark, the page's declaration, or UTF-8.
base_url	The document's URL, used to resolve relative links; NULL if unknown.
comments	Whether to keep comment nodes.
limits	Resource limits from html_limits().
path	One file path, URL or connection; see "Reading files, URLs and connections".
...	Arguments passed on to html_parse().

Details

html_parse() never treats a string as a file name or URL.

Value

A zuhtml_document.

Reading files, URLs and connections

html_read() reads its input as raw bytes, then decodes and parses them as html_parse() does:

• a string with an http, https, ftp, ftps or file scheme (in any case) is read with url(), and becomes the document's base_url unless base_url is given. A redirect is not seen, so after one the base URL is the address asked for. HTTP headers are not read either: the encoding comes from a byte-order mark, encoding or the page's ⁠<meta>⁠. For anything more (headers, authentication, retries), fetch with an HTTP client and pass the body to html_parse();

• any other string is a file path;

• a connection, such as gzfile() or rawConnection(), is read as readBin() reads one: an unopened connection is opened in "rb" mode and closed afterwards; an open one must be in binary mode, is read from its current position, and is left open. A non-blocking pipe or socket that has no data yet is an error rather than a short read.

Reading stops with a zuhtml_limit_error as soon as the input passes four times max_input bytes, before a larger file is read at all. A file that does not exist, an unreachable URL, and a connection that cannot be read are zuhtml_input_errors. The input is always read whole before parsing, because decoding needs all of it.

Encoding

A character string is taken as text: it is converted to UTF-8 with enc2utf8(), and encoding must be NULL or "UTF-8". A string marked as "bytes" is rejected; pass a raw vector instead.

A raw vector is decoded with, in order of precedence, a byte-order mark (UTF-8, UTF-16LE or UTF-16BE), encoding, a declaration in the page, or UTF-8. A byte-order mark that contradicts encoding is an error, and so is any byte sequence that is invalid in the chosen encoding: nothing is replaced silently. A fetcher that knows the HTTP charset should pass it as encoding.

The declaration is found as browsers find it, by the HTML standard's prescan of the first 1024 bytes for ⁠<meta charset="...">⁠ or ⁠<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="...; charset=...">⁠. The prescan skips comments and the insides of tags, but not the text of scripts. Labels are those of the Encoding Standard, which maps several to a superset: "iso-8859-1", "latin1" and "us-ascii" mean windows-1252, "gb2312" means GBK, and a UTF-16 label means UTF-8 (the bytes read as ASCII, so they are not UTF-16). An unknown label is ignored. html_info() reports the encoding used and its source.

A file saved in another encoding without updating its declaration, as some tools do when they convert pages to UTF-8, decodes wrongly or fails to decode, as it would in a browser. Pass its real encoding as encoding.

A leading byte-order mark is removed. Input containing a NUL character after decoding is rejected.

See Also

html_problems() for the parse errors that were repaired; html_limits(); zuhtml-conditions for the errors these functions raise.

Other parsing: html_fragment(), html_info(), html_limits(), html_problems(), zuhtml_info()

Examples

doc <- html_parse("<p>Hello <b>world</b>")
doc

# Raw bytes in a declared encoding:
html_parse(as.raw(c(0x3c, 0x70, 0x3e, 0xe9)), encoding = "latin1")

# From a file:
path <- tempfile(fileext = ".html")
writeLines("<title>Saved page</title><p>Text", path)
html_read(path)

# From a compressed file, through a connection:
gz <- tempfile(fileext = ".html.gz")
writeLines("<p>Compressed", gzfile(gz))
html_read(gzfile(gz))

# From a URL, when online; relative links resolve against it:
if (interactive()) {
  doc <- html_read("https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/")
  head(html_links(doc, absolute = TRUE))
}

zuhtml documentation built on Oct. 6, 2026, 5:06 p.m.