JustHTML

HTML from the real web is messy. It is often malformed, user supplied, scraped from unknown pages, or headed for a browser where small parsing differences can become security bugs.

JustHTML gives Python projects one small dependency for the common HTML jobs:

parse HTML like a browser, including broken markup
sanitize untrusted HTML by default
query with CSS selectors
transform, serialize, extract text, or convert to Markdown
run anywhere Python runs, with no C extension and no system package to install

pip install justhtml

Requires Python 3.10 or later.

Documentation | Comparison | Playground | Security policy

JustHTML turns messy unsafe HTML into a sanitized, queryable DOM, then serializes it to text, Markdown, or HTML.

Why Use It?

Most Python HTML libraries optimize for one part of the problem.

html.parser is built in, but not HTML5-correct. BeautifulSoup is convenient, but depends heavily on the parser underneath. lxml and C/Rust-backed parsers are fast, but usually leave sanitization as a separate concern. html5lib and Bleach shaped the Python ecosystem, but both are no longer the obvious foundation for new projects.

JustHTML is for applications that want a boring, inspectable, pure-Python default:

Correct parsing: browser-style HTML5 recovery, tested against the web platform html5 treebuilder tests.
Safe by default: JustHTML(html) sanitizes before you query or serialize.
One DOM: parse once, then sanitize, query, transform, serialize, extract text, or produce Markdown.
Easy deployment: zero runtime dependencies, no compiler, works on PyPy and Pyodide.
Honest tradeoff: if you are parsing terabytes of trusted HTML, use a C/Rust parser. If you need reliable handling of untrusted or malformed HTML inside a Python app, use JustHTML.

Real-world signal: Mozilla Support migrated from Bleach to JustHTML in Kitsune, the Django application behind support.mozilla.org.

Quick Start

from justhtml import JustHTML

doc = JustHTML(
    "<p>Hello<script>alert(1)</script> "
    "<a href='javascript:alert(1)'>bad</a> "
    "<a href='https://example.com'>ok</a></p>",
    fragment=True,
)

print(doc.to_html(pretty=False))
# => <p>Hello <a>bad</a> <a href="https://example.com">ok</a></p>

Sanitization is enabled by default. Disable it only for trusted input:

doc = JustHTML("<main><p class='intro'>Hello</p></main>", sanitize=False)
intro = doc.query_one("p.intro")

print(intro.to_text())
# => Hello

What You Can Do

from justhtml import JustHTML, Linkify, SetAttrs, Unwrap

doc = JustHTML(
    "<p>Hello <span>world</span> example.com</p>",
    fragment=True,
    sanitize=False,
    transforms=[
        Unwrap("span"),
        Linkify(),
        SetAttrs("a", rel="nofollow"),
    ],
)

print(doc.to_html(pretty=False))
# => <p>Hello world <a href="http://example.com" rel="nofollow">example.com</a></p>

JustHTML includes:

CSS selectors: query() and query_one()
Sanitization: allowlisted HTML cleaning, URL policies, inline CSS controls
Transforms: unwrap, drop, edit attributes, linkify, compose cleanup pipelines
Text output: to_text() and Markdown generation
Builder API: construct nodes directly from Python
Streaming: process large inputs incrementally
Bleach migration guide: move existing sanitizer code to JustHTML policies

Command Line

# Pretty-print an HTML file
justhtml index.html

# Parse from stdin
curl -s https://example.com | justhtml -

# Extract text from selected nodes
justhtml index.html --selector "main p" --format text

# Convert selected HTML to Markdown
justhtml index.html --selector "article" --format markdown

Correctness

JustHTML is tested against the web platform html5 treebuilder tests, plus html5lib serializer/encoding fixtures and project-specific sanitizer, selector, transform, CLI, and regression tests.

The current test suite enforces 100% combined line and branch coverage, including the parser engine. The parser engine additionally requires exact agreement with the reference path across the web platform html5 treebuilder suite. See Correctness Testing for details.

Documentation

Security

JustHTML sanitizes by default, but output safety still depends on where you put it. HTML body output is not automatically safe inside JavaScript, CSS, URL attributes, or other contexts.

For the supported-version policy and vulnerability reporting, see SECURITY.md.