breadability

Port of Readability HTML parser in Python

breadability v0.1.21 100.7K downloads/30d#12,978 on PyPI★ 205

Permissive license BSD Active released 2026-08-12

What it is and what it does

Breadability is a Python port of the Arc90 Readability algorithm, designed to parse HTML pages and extract the main article content while filtering out navigation, sidebars, ads, and other boilerplate. It uses a scoring system to identify the most likely content container, then cleans and returns readable HTML or text.

The package provides both a command-line interface and a Python API. It depends on docopt for CLI argument parsing, chardet for character encoding detection, and lxml for HTML parsing. The library is maintained and actively used in production tools. It supports Python 2.6 through 3.6 and offers options for debugging parse decisions, opening results in a browser, or returning full documents instead of fragments.

Use it for:

Extract article text from news websites for content aggregation or archival tools.
Clean HTML before feeding it to NLP or text analysis pipelines.
Build a web scraper that reliably isolates main content across diverse site layouts.
Debug why a parser chose certain nodes as content using verbose scoring output.
Convert web pages to readable text for offline reading or accessibility.

Worth the install?

AI-flagged interpretation of the facts on this page — verify before relying

Extracts the main readable content from HTML pages by identifying and isolating the article text while removing boilerplate, navigation, and ads.

Yes. The package is actively maintained, has no known vulnerabilities, installs with low friction, and solves a well-defined problem. It is suitable for production use if you need reliable HTML-to-readable-content extraction. The BSD license poses no restrictions. Install only if you can satisfy the lxml build dependency; otherwise, consider it a straightforward choice.

Install

breadability on PyPI

pip

pip install breadability

uv

uv add breadability

poetry

poetry add breadability

Installing breadability

Before you install

Low friction install with a pure-Python wheel. Active maintenance—last release 2 days ago. Depends on lxml, which requires C headers (libxml2-dev, libxslt-dev) at build time on some systems, but this is a one-time setup cost.

License in practice

BSD license (permissive). You can use, modify, and distribute this package freely in both open-source and commercial projects with minimal restrictions.

Quickstart

from breadability.readable import Article

html_text = "<html>...</html>"
url = "http://example.com/article"
document = Article(html_text, url=url)
print(document.readable)

lxml requires libxml2-dev and libxslt-dev system libraries to compile; install via apt-get or equivalent before pip install.

Verify before relying

Whether the package handles modern HTML5 and contemporary web layouts as well as the original Arc90 readability algorithm.
Performance characteristics on large documents or high-volume extraction workloads.
Accuracy of content extraction on contemporary news sites and blogging platforms.

Package facts

License	BSD (permissive)
Python support	not specified
Install friction	low — pure-Python wheel
Runtime dependencies	3 — docopt, chardet, lxml
Maintenance	actively maintained — 2 days since the last release
Last repo commit	2026-08-12
First released	2012-05-07
Downloads	100,652/month — #12,978 on PyPI (30-day window, as of 2026-08-14)
Known vulnerabilities	none known (OSV.dev, checked 2026-08-14)

Evidence: breadability-0.1.21-py2.py3-none-any.whl

Keywords: bookie, breadability, content, HTML, parsing, readability, readable

Development Status :: 5 - Production/StableIntended Audience :: DevelopersLicense :: OSI Approved :: BSD LicenseOperating System :: OS IndependentProgramming Language :: PythonProgramming Language :: Python :: 2Programming Language :: Python :: 2.6Programming Language :: Python :: 2.7Programming Language :: Python :: 3Programming Language :: Python :: 3.2Programming Language :: Python :: 3.3Programming Language :: Python :: 3.4Programming Language :: Python :: 3.5Programming Language :: Python :: 3.6Programming Language :: Python :: Implementation :: CPythonTopic :: Internet :: WWW/HTTPTopic :: Software Development :: Pre-processorsTopic :: Text Processing :: FiltersTopic :: Text Processing :: Markup :: HTML