Install htmlcxx with Homebrew

Project links

• Homepage

Commands and aliases

• htmlcxx

Project history

The SourceForge project was registered in 2003 and the project page names Davi de Castro Reis and Robson Braga Araujo as maintainers. The project documentation describes a parser designed to mimic Mozilla Firefox parsing behavior without inserting bytes that were not present in the input document.

The later README says the project spent a decade on SourceForge, was manually copied elsewhere, and then moved to GitHub with accumulated patches. It also says the library is frozen except for eventual bug fixes, which fits its role as a stable, old C++ parsing component.

Adoption history

htmlcxx appears in Homebrew, Alpine, Debian and Ubuntu library packages, Fedora-family packages, Nix, Arch, and openSUSE. Distribution packaging is especially relevant because C++ users often want headers and libraries from system package managers rather than vendored source snapshots.

How it is used

The README shows C++ code parsing an HTML string into a tree, walking links, dumping text, and using the htmlcxx command-line application to inspect how the library parses input. Its sweet spot is lightweight extraction or parser experiments where preserving original document bytes matters.

Why package nerds care

For package nerds, htmlcxx is an old-school SourceForge C++ library that still shows up in distro package sets because it offers a compact API and a specific round-tripping behavior. It is less a general web platform parser than a useful legacy component for native-code tools.

Timeline

• 2003: The SourceForge project was registered.
• 2009: A SourceForge user review described it as fast, solid, robust, and easy to use.
• 2015: The README records the SourceForge-to-GitHub move and says the library is frozen except for fixes.
• Version 0.85: The news notes gcc 4.3 fixes and CSS library distribution improvements.
• Version 0.86: The news notes compilation fixes.
• Version 0.87: The news notes cherry-picked fixes from a long-running fork.

Related projects

• Related native and parser projects include Gumbo, libxml2's HTML parser, html5lib ports, tree.hh, and hcxselect. The README also references Mozilla Firefox behavior as a model for parse trees.

Sources

• Homebrew and distribution package metadata support package-manager adoption.
• SourceForge project metadata documents registration, maintainers, description, project activity, and package identity.
• The README documents SourceForge history, GitHub move, frozen status, parser design, examples, and version news.