lua-gumbo is a HTML5 parser and DOM library for Lua. It originally started out as a set of Lua bindings for the Gumbo C library, but has now absorbed an improved fork of it.

• C99 compiler
• Lua 5.1+ or LuaJIT 2.0+

To install the latest release via LuaRocks use the command:

luarocks install gumbo

The gumbo module provides a parse function and a parseFile function, which both return a Document node containing a tree of descendant nodes. The structure and API of this tree mostly follows the DOM Level 4 Core specification.

For full API documentation, see: https://craigbarnes.gitlab.io/lua-gumbo/.

The following is a simple demonstration of how to find an element by ID and print the contents of it's first child text node.

local gumbo = require "gumbo"
local document = gumbo.parse('<div id="foo">Hello World</div>')
local foo = document:getElementById("foo")
local text = foo.childNodes[1].data
print(text) --> Hello World

Note: this example omits error handling for the sake of simplicity. Production code should wrap each step with assert() or some other, application-specific error handling.

See also: https://craigbarnes.gitlab.io/lua-gumbo/#examples.