Scrape product prices, headlines, or other data from websites by fetching HTML and selecting elements with CSS queries.
Transform HTML markup in build pipelines or static site generators by parsing and modifying document structure.
Extract structured data from HTML emails or documents for processing in backend applications.
Cheerio is a TypeScript library that lets you read and modify HTML or XML documents using a style that will feel familiar to anyone who has worked with jQuery, a once-ubiquitous JavaScript tool for selecting and changing elements on web pages. The key difference is that Cheerio runs on a server, not inside a browser, so it works with raw HTML strings rather than a live browser page. The practical use case is web scraping: you fetch the raw HTML of a web page, hand it to Cheerio, and then use CSS-style selectors to pinpoint the data you care about, a product price, a headline, a table row, and extract or modify it. You load the HTML, write something like "$('h2.title').text()" to find all h2 elements with a certain class and read their text, and get your result back instantly. Cheerio is built for speed and simplicity. It parses HTML using proven parsers (parse5 or htmlparser2), strips out the complex browser machinery that jQuery normally relies on, and gives you just the selection and manipulation API. It works in both server and browser environments. Developers reach for it when they need to process HTML programmatically, whether scraping a site, transforming markup in a build pipeline, or parsing structured data out of an HTML email.
Generated 2026-05-18 · Model: sonnet-4-6 · Verify against the repo before relying on details.