Trafilatura: Discover Web Content, Extract Text and Metadata

August 21, 2026 · View on GitHub


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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:

Diagram of trafilatura and related packages (htmldate, courlan, jusText)

Corresponding posts can be found on Bits of Language.