cheerio load from file

Vishal Basumatary -

Cheerio Load from File

As a web developer, I have worked with many HTML parsing libraries and one of my favorites is Cheerio. Cheerio is a fast, flexible, and lean implementation of core jQuery designed specifically for the server. It allows you to manipulate and traverse HTML documents using the same syntax as jQuery, which makes it a great choice for web scraping, testing, and data mining.

How to Load HTML from a File using Cheerio

One of the most common tasks when working with Cheerio is to load an HTML file and parse it. Cheerio provides a simple API for loading HTML from a file:


const fs = require('fs');
const cheerio = require('cheerio');

const html = fs.readFileSync('path/to/file.html', 'utf8');
const $ = cheerio.load(html);
  • The fs.readFileSync() method reads the contents of the file synchronously and returns a string.
  • The cheerio.load() method loads the HTML string into a Cheerio object.

Once you have loaded the HTML into a Cheerio object, you can use the same syntax as jQuery to manipulate and traverse the HTML:


$('h1').text('Hello Cheerio!');

This code selects all <h1> elements in the HTML document and sets their text content to Hello Cheerio!.

Other Ways to Load HTML using Cheerio

Aside from loading HTML from a file, Cheerio provides several other ways to load HTML:

  • Load from a URL: You can use the cheerio.load() method with the request() module to load HTML from a URL:

const request = require('request');
const cheerio = require('cheerio');

request('http://example.com', (error, response, html) => {
  const $ = cheerio.load(html);
});
  • Load from a String: You can use the cheerio.load() method to load HTML from a string:

const cheerio = require('cheerio');

const html = '<html><body><p>Hello Cheerio!</p></body></html>';
const $ = cheerio.load(html);

These are just a few examples of how you can load HTML using Cheerio. With its simple and powerful API, Cheerio is an excellent tool for working with HTML on the server.