[opensourcedex]

trafilatura is a free, open source data extraction & web scraping project written in Python and released under Apache-2.0. It has 6,832 GitHub stars, 431 forks and 60 open issues, and was last pushed 6 days ago. On this registry it ranks #27 of 45 tracked projects in Data Extraction & Web Scraping, with 5 head-to-head comparisons available. It gained 10 stars over the last 3 tracked days.

What is trafilatura?

Trafilatura is a Python package and command-line tool that crawls the web and turns raw HTML into structured text and metadata, built for developers, researchers, and data teams assembling corpora, news feeds, or retrieval-augmented generation datasets.

What it is

Trafilatura is a comprehensive Python package and command-line tool designed to gather text from the web and turn raw HTML into structured, meaningful data. Its stated goal is to stay handy and modular: no database is required, and output converts to commonly used formats. Going from raw HTML to the essential parts, it focuses on actual content, avoids noise caused by recurring elements such as headers, footers, and boilerplate, and makes sense of the data and metadata. The extractor strikes a balance between limiting noise (precision) and including all valid parts (recall).

The concrete problem it solves is the gap between a downloaded page and usable data. Instead of hand-writing per-site selectors or carrying a heavy scraping stack, a caller passes HTML or a URL and receives clean main text plus metadata. It does not replace a browser automation framework: it replaces ad-hoc article extraction code in the Python ecosystem, offering its own rule-based extractor with jusText and readability-lxml as fallbacks. It includes all necessary discovery and text processing components for web crawling, downloads, scraping, and extraction of main texts, metadata, and comments.

Key capabilities

  • Web crawling and text discovery with support for sitemaps (TXT, XML) and feeds (ATOM, JSON, RSS), plus URL filtering and deduplication.
  • Parallel processing of online and offline input: live URLs through download queues, and previously downloaded HTML files or parsed HTML trees.
  • Robust, configurable extraction of main text, using an own rule-based extractor with jusText and readability-lxml as fallbacks.
  • Metadata extraction covering title, author, date, site name, categories, and tags.
  • Structure preservation for paragraphs, titles, lists, quotes, code, line breaks, and in-line text formatting, with optional comments, links, images, and tables.
  • Multiple output formats: TXT, Markdown, CSV, JSON, HTML, XML, and XML-TEI.
  • Optional add-ons for language detection and speed optimizations, exposed through API calls such as fetch_url and extract.

Who uses it and how

  • Corpus builders running large-scale text collection, reflected in the corpus-builder and corpus-tools topics.
  • NLP, LLM, and RAG pipeline authors who need clean text and metadata before chunking or embedding, reflected in the llm, nlp, and rag topics.
  • News aggregation and news crawling teams, where sitemap and feed support maps directly onto recurring publication schedules.
  • Research and evaluation users: the project is cited in an ACL demo paper, and the README lists HuggingFace, IBM, Microsoft Research, NVIDIA, the Allen Institute for AI, Stanford, and the Internet Archive among users.
  • Offline re-processing workflows that operate on previously downloaded HTML files or parsed HTML trees rather than fetching pages again.

Getting started

Install the trafilatura package from PyPI, or use the bundled command-line tool; the README shows the Python entry point as from trafilatura import fetch_url, extract, with extract(downloaded, output_format="json", with_metadata=True) producing JSON alongside the default text output.

How it compares

Among the tools named in the facts, jusText and readability-lxml appear as fallback extractors inside Trafilatura rather than as alternatives to it. The project states that it consistently outperforms other open-source libraries in text extraction benchmarks, and it reports being the most efficient open-source library in ScrapingHub's article extraction benchmark and the best single tool by ROUGE-LSum Mean F1 Page Scores in Bevendorff's empirical comparison of web content extraction algorithms.

When to use it — and when not

Because no database is required, storage, scheduling, and serving of extracted corpora remain the operator's responsibility, as do the network egress and politeness controls around crawl queues. Language detection and speed optimizations are optional add-ons rather than defaults, so pipelines relying on them must enable them explicitly. Teams wanting a managed crawling service with built-in storage should look elsewhere; Trafilatura suits those who want extraction logic inside their own Python process.

project readme (upstream, from github) — read inline

Trafilatura: Discover Web Content, Extract Text and Metadata


Trafilatura Logo

Python package Python versions Documentation Status Code Coverage Downloads Reference DOI: 10.18653/v1/2021.acl-demo.15

>>> from trafilatura import fetch_url, extract
>>> downloaded = fetch_url("https://github.blog/2019-03-29-leader-spotlight-erin-spiceland/")
>>> extract(downloaded)
'Erin Spiceland is a software engineer and ...'
>>> extract(downloaded, output_format="json", with_metadata=True)
'{"title": "Leader spotlight: Erin Spiceland", "author": "Jessica Rudder", "text": "Erin Spiceland is a software engineer and ..."}'

Introduction

Trafilatura is a comprehensive Python package and command-line tool designed to gather text from the Web and turn 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 raw HTML to essential parts, it focuses on the actual content, avoids noise caused by recurring elements (headers, footers, boilerplate), and makes sense of the data and metadata. 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 across thousands of projects, including by HuggingFace, IBM, Microsoft Research, NVIDIA, the Allen Institute for AI, Stanford, and the Internet Archive.

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 (own rule-based extractor with jusText and readability-lxml as fallbacks)
    • 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
    • Optional add-ons: language detection, speed optimizations

  • Multiple output formats:

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

Evaluation

Trafilatura consistently outperforms other open-source libraries in text extraction benchmarks. For more information see the benchmark section and the evaluation readme to run the evaluation with the latest data and packages.

Other evaluations

Documentation

Getting started with Trafilatura is straightforward. For more information and detailed guides, visit Trafilatura's documentation:

See the video tutorials playlist (multiple languages).

License

This package is distributed under the Apache 2.0 license.

Versions prior to v1.8.0 are under GPLv3+ license.

Contributing

Contributions of all kinds are welcome. Visit the Contributing page for more information. Bug reports can be filed on the dedicated issue page.

Many thanks to the contributors who extended the docs or submitted bug reports, features and bugfixes!

Support

If you value this software or depend on it for your product, consider sponsoring it and contributing to its codebase. Your support on GitHub or ko-fi.com will help maintain and enhance this package.

Context

This work started as a PhD project at the crossroads of linguistics and NLP. This expertise has been instrumental in shaping Trafilatura over the years. Initially launched to create text databases for research purposes at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences (DWDS and ZDL units), this package continues to be maintained and its future depends on community support.

Trafilatura is an Italian word for wire drawing symbolizing the refinement and conversion process. It is also the way shapes of pasta are formed.

Author

Reach out via the software repository or the contact page for inquiries, collaborations, or feedback. See also social networks for the latest updates.

Citing Trafilatura

Trafilatura is widely used in the academic domain, chiefly for data acquisition. Here is how to cite it:

Reference DOI: 10.18653/v1/2021.acl-demo.15 Zenodo archive DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3460969

@inproceedings{barbaresi-2021-trafilatura,
  title = {{Trafilatura: A Web Scraping Library and Command-Line Tool for Text Discovery and Extraction}},
  author = "Barbaresi, Adrien",
  booktitle = "Proceedings of the Joint Conference of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations",
  pages = "122--131",
  publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
  url = "https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-demo.15",
  year = 2021,
}

Software ecosystem

Jointly developed plugins and additional packages also contribute to the field of web data extraction and analysis:

<img alt="Diagram of tra

readme truncated — read the full docs on github

Frequently asked questions

Is trafilatura free to use?

trafilatura is open source under the Apache-2.0 licence. There is no licence fee and no seat count — you can self-host it or, where the project offers one, pay a vendor for a managed version instead.

What does trafilatura do?

Python & Command-line tool to gather text and metadata on the Web: Crawling, scraping, extraction, output as CSV, JSON, HTML, MD, TXT, XML

What is trafilatura written in?

trafilatura is primarily written in Python. Its source is publicly available at https://github.com/adbar/trafilatura, and it has 6,832 GitHub stars.