JSON vs. JavaScript vs. parsel vs. Visual Basic Comparison Chart

JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight data-interchange format. It is easy for humans to read and write. It is easy for machines to parse and generate. It is based on a subset of the JavaScript Programming Language Standard ECMA-262 3rd Edition - December 1999. JSON is a text format that is completely language independent but uses conventions that are familiar to programmers of the C-family of languages, including C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Perl, Python, and many others. These properties make JSON an ideal data-interchange language. JSON is built on two structures: 1. A collection of name/value pairs. In various languages, this is realized as an object, record, struct, dictionary, hash table, keyed list, or associative array. 2. An ordered list of values. In most languages, this is realized as an array, vector, list, or sequence. These are universal data structures. Virtually all modern programming languages support them in one form or another.

Parsel is a BSD-licensed Python library to extract and remove data from HTML and XML using XPath and CSS selectors, optionally combined with regular expressions. Create a selector object for the HTML or XML text that you want to parse. Then use CSS or XPath expressions to select elements. CSS is a language for applying styles to HTML documents. It defines selectors to associate those styles with specific HTML elements. XPath is a language for selecting nodes in XML documents, which can also be used with HTML. You can use either CSS or XPath. CSS is usually more readable, but some things can only be done with XPath. Being built atop lxml, parsel selectors support some EXSLT extensions and come with pre-registered namespaces to use in XPath expressions. Parsel selectors allow you to chain selectors, so most of the time you can just select by class using CSS and then switch to XPath when needed.