Ah it looks like a C-based variant of Meeseeks except it can also create HTML too, quite nice!

Modest is the full project of which Alexander Borisov’s (lexborisov) myhtml, which also has an Elixir wrapper, is a part. It’s closer to being a C-varient of… maybe Servo? It’s larger in scope than just parsing HTML.

Everything I’ve seen suggests that Modest (and probably ModestEx) will be fast, with low resource usage. That’s pretty great.

Thanks guys!

I have a use case where a request reads html from a database and before rendering I need to do some changes on the html string. In my case the html is quite large and the changes are quite extensive.

The idea for ModestEx is to implement a set of features that just do transformations on a html string. Each transformation feature will be done in C.

Something like:

result ModestEx.find("<p><a>Hello</a> World</p>", "p a")
|> ModestEx.attribute("href", "https://elixir-lang.org")

will return:

{:ok,  "<a href=\"https://elixir-lang.org\">Hello</a>"}

… ready to render in a template.

Or you could also serialize it:

ModestEx.serialize(result)

and return:

{:ok,  "<html><head></head><body><a href=\"https://elixir-lang.org\">Hello</a></body></html>"}

Which is already a (more or less) valid page!

Of course, if you need further decoding htmlex, floki or Meeseeks are great!
I see ModestEx as a useful addition to the landscape of html tools in Elixir.

For sure, I have been very hesitant to try adding transformations to Meeseeks, so I’m glad somebody’s doing it.

Oooo, that’s fascinating!

Yeah this looks very useful!

Heh, yeah it’s quite a thing to tackle. ^.^

Hey @mischov @OvermindDL1

I just published ModestEx v0.0.2-dev.

Thanks again for your input. It’s a lot clearer now what the main strength of the library actually is!

I added a new feature ModestEx.get_attribute and ModestEx.set_attribute.

And you can actually pipe them together.

iex> ModestEx.find("<p><a>Hello</a><a>World</a></p>", "p a") |> 
...> ModestEx.set_attribute("href", ["https://elixir-lang.org", "https://google.de"])
["<html><head></head><body><a href=\"https://elixir-lang.org\">Hello</a></body></html>", "<html><head></head><body><a href=\"https://google.de\">World</a></body></html>"]

Wohoo! This is great news

Will we get Elixir based end 2 end headless browser testing soon?

Thanks for the reference and I am delighted to see a binding to Modest.

I have a few use cases where I will get back to it for sure.

Hey guys,

the first mayor release is coming soon and I hope to publish it before ElixirConf EU in April.

I also implemented a new CSS selector for :contains(text) in Modest PR#42.

I’ll keep you updated!

Release v1.0.0

This release is stable.

def deps do
  [
    {:modest_ex, "~> 1.0.0"}
  ]
end

Total 16 features implemented. See complete feature list.

Total 38 selector patterns implemented (including custom selector :contains(text)).
See complete list of supported CSS selectors.

The package includes all binding code under the folder target/modest_worker.
All Modest related features are implemented in a single C library called modest_html.

This way, all features are tested in a C environment using CMake/CTest with memory tracking enabled using a library called dmt.

Please feel invited to check it out

Best, F34nk

Greetings @f34nk , I have been trying to get modest_ex to work with Erlang 24.x. I know my C/C++ is rusty, but I’ve spent a good half-day on this without any progress. I am currently stuck looking for vec.h, which doesn’t seem to exist anywhere on my Mac or Linux boxes. Any pointers here? Thank you!