--- id: breadability version: "0.1.21" license: BSD license_treatment: permissive maintenance: active --- # breadability — Port of Readability HTML parser in Python License: permissive · Maintenance: active · Downloads: 100.7K/mo ## 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 above — 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 pip install breadability uv add breadability 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 = "..." 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: unspecified - Install friction: low - Maintenance: active - Downloads: 100.7K/month (top 15,000 on PyPI) - Known vulnerabilities: none known ## Tags html content extraction, readability parser python, article text extraction, web page cleaning, boilerplate removal, html parsing readability, main content extraction, content-extraction, html-parsing, web-scraping [View on SkillFed](https://skillfed.io/packages/breadability) · [View on PyPI](https://pypi.org/project/breadability/)