3 unstable releases

0.2.0	Feb 28, 2026
0.1.1	Feb 28, 2026
0.1.0	Feb 28, 2026

#1392 in Text processing

Used in trafilatura

MIT license

240KB
4.5K SLoC

libreadability

Extract the main article content from web pages.

A Rust port of readability by readeck, which is a Go port of Mozilla's Readability.js.

Usage

Add to your Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
libreadability = "0.2"

use libreadability::extract;

let html = r#"<html><body>
  <article>
    <h1>Breaking News</h1>
    <p>This is the main article body with enough text to be extracted.</p>
    <p>The readability algorithm scores content density and identifies the
    primary article content, stripping navigation, ads, and other boilerplate.</p>
  </article>
</body></html>"#;

let article = extract(html, None).unwrap();

println!("Title: {}", article.title);
println!("Text: {}", article.text_content);
println!("HTML: {}", article.content);

What it returns

The Article struct contains:

Field	Description
`title`	Article title
`byline`	Author attribution
`excerpt`	Short description or first paragraph
`content`	Cleaned article HTML
`text_content`	Plain text (via InnerText algorithm)
`length`	Character count of text content
`site_name`	Publisher name
`image`	Lead image URL
`language`	Detected language
`published_time`	Publication timestamp
`modified_time`	Last modified timestamp
`dir`	Text direction (`ltr` or `rtl`)

Configuration

Configure via public fields or chainable builder methods:

use libreadability::Parser;

// Builder style
let mut parser = Parser::new()
    .with_char_threshold(200)
    .with_keep_classes(true)
    .with_disable_jsonld(true);

// Or set fields directly
let mut parser = Parser::new();
parser.char_threshold = 200;
parser.keep_classes = true;

Optional features

Feature	Description
`tracing`	Enable debug/trace logging at key algorithm points (zero-cost when disabled)

libreadability = { version = "0.2", features = ["tracing"] }

Benchmarks

Rust vs Go (readeck/readability) on representative pages:

Page	Go	Rust	Speedup
ars-1 (~56 KB)	1.85 ms	854 µs	2.2x
wapo-1 (~180 KB)	10.1 ms	2.46 ms	4.1x
wikipedia (~244 KB)	18.3 ms	6.79 ms	2.7x
nytimes-3 (~489 KB)	19.5 ms	3.35 ms	5.8x
yahoo-2 (~1.6 MB)	35.8 ms	7.11 ms	5.0x
all 133 fixtures	670 ms	320 ms	2.1x

Measured on Apple M4 Max, Rust 1.93, Go 1.25, macOS 15.7.

Reproduce:

cargo bench                  # Criterion benchmarks
./benches/compare.sh         # Rust vs Go comparison table

License

MIT

Dependencies

~8–13MB
~204K SLoC