Trafilatura: Discover and Extract Text Data on the Web

Introduction

Trafilatura is a cutting-edge Python package and command-line tool designed to gather text on the Web and simplify the process of turning raw HTML into structured, meaningful data. It includes all necessary discovery and text processing components to perform web crawling, downloads, scraping, and extraction of main texts, metadata and comments. It aims at staying handy and modular: no database is required, the output can be converted to commonly used formats.

Going from HTML bulk to essential parts can alleviate many problems related to text quality, by focusing on the actual content, avoiding the noise caused by recurring elements like headers and footers and by making sense of the data and metadata with selected information. The extractor strikes a balance between limiting noise (precision) and including all valid parts (recall). It is robust and reasonably fast.

Trafilatura is widely used and integrated into thousands of projects by companies like HuggingFace, IBM, and Microsoft Research as well as institutions like the Allen Institute, Stanford, the Tokyo Institute of Technology, and the University of Munich.

Features

• Advanced web crawling and text discovery:

  • Support for sitemaps (TXT, XML) and feeds (ATOM, JSON, RSS)
  • Smart crawling and URL management (filtering and deduplication)

• Parallel processing of online and offline input:

  • Live URLs, efficient and polite processing of download queues
  • Previously downloaded HTML files and parsed HTML trees

• Robust and configurable extraction of key elements:

  • Main text (common patterns and generic algorithms like jusText and readability)
  • Metadata (title, author, date, site name, categories and tags)
  • Formatting and structure: paragraphs, titles, lists, quotes, code, line breaks, in-line text formatting
  • Optional elements: comments, links, images, tables

• Multiple output formats:

  • TXT and Markdown
  • CSV
  • JSON
  • HTML, XML and XML-TEI

• Optional add-ons:

  • Language detection on extracted content
  • Speed optimizations

• Actively maintained with support from the open-source community:

  • Regular updates, feature additions, and optimizations
  • Comprehensive documentation

Evaluation and alternatives

Trafilatura consistently outperforms other open-source libraries in text extraction benchmarks, showcasing its efficiency and accuracy in extracting web content. The extractor tries to strike a balance between limiting noise and including all valid parts.

For more information see the benchmark section and the evaluation readme to run the evaluation with the latest data and packages.

Other evaluations:

• Most efficient open-source library in ScrapingHub's article extraction benchmark
• Best overall tool according to Bien choisir son outil d'extraction de contenu à partir du Web (Lejeune & Barbaresi 2020)
• Best single tool by ROUGE-LSum Mean F1 Page Scores in An Empirical Comparison of Web Content Extraction Algorithms (Bevendorff et al. 2023)

Usage and documentation

[Getting started with Trafilat