BREAKING CHANGE: Table extraction now uses Strategy Design Pattern
This epic commit introduces a game-changing approach to table extraction in Crawl4AI:
✨ NEW FEATURES:
- LLMTableExtraction: AI-powered extraction for complex HTML tables with rowspan/colspan
- Smart Chunking: Automatically splits massive tables into optimal chunks at row boundaries
- Parallel Processing: Processes multiple chunks simultaneously for blazing-fast extraction
- Intelligent Merging: Seamlessly combines chunk results into complete tables
- Header Preservation: Each chunk maintains context with original headers
- Auto-retry Logic: Built-in resilience with configurable retry attempts
🏗️ ARCHITECTURE:
- Strategy Design Pattern for pluggable table extraction strategies
- ThreadPoolExecutor for concurrent chunk processing
- Token-based chunking with configurable thresholds
- Handles tables without headers gracefully
⚡ PERFORMANCE:
- Process 1000+ row tables without timeout
- Parallel processing with up to 5 concurrent chunks
- Smart token estimation prevents LLM context overflow
- Optimized for providers like Groq for massive tables
🔧 CONFIGURATION:
- enable_chunking: Auto-handle large tables (default: True)
- chunk_token_threshold: When to split (default: 3000 tokens)
- min_rows_per_chunk: Meaningful chunk sizes (default: 10)
- max_parallel_chunks: Concurrent processing (default: 5)
📚 BACKWARD COMPATIBILITY:
- Existing code continues to work unchanged
- DefaultTableExtraction remains the default strategy
- Progressive enhancement approach
This is the future of web table extraction - handling everything from simple tables to massive, complex data grids with merged cells and nested structures. The chunking is completely transparent to users while providing unprecedented scalability.
- fix handling of special keys in Windows msvcrt implementation
- Guard against UnicodeDecodeError from multi-byte key sequences
- Filter out non-printable characters and control sequences
- Add error handling to prevent coroutine crashes
- Add unit test to verify keyboard input handling
Key changes:
- Safe UTF-8 decoding with try/except for special keys
- Skip non-printable and multi-byte character sequences
- Add broad exception handling in keyboard listener
Test runs on Windows only due to msvcrt dependency.
This commit introduces platform-specific handling for the 'q' key press to quit the browser profiler, ensuring compatibility with both Windows and Unix-like systems. It also adds a check to see if the browser process has already exited, terminating the input listener if so.
- Implemented `msvcrt` for Windows to capture keyboard input without requiring a newline.
- Retained `termios`, `tty`, and `select` for Unix-like systems.
- Added a check for browser process termination to gracefully exit the input listener.
- Updated logger messages to use colored output for better user experience.
BREAKING CHANGE: Table extraction now uses Strategy Design Pattern
This epic commit introduces a game-changing approach to table extraction in Crawl4AI:
✨ NEW FEATURES:
- LLMTableExtraction: AI-powered extraction for complex HTML tables with rowspan/colspan
- Smart Chunking: Automatically splits massive tables into optimal chunks at row boundaries
- Parallel Processing: Processes multiple chunks simultaneously for blazing-fast extraction
- Intelligent Merging: Seamlessly combines chunk results into complete tables
- Header Preservation: Each chunk maintains context with original headers
- Auto-retry Logic: Built-in resilience with configurable retry attempts
🏗️ ARCHITECTURE:
- Strategy Design Pattern for pluggable table extraction strategies
- ThreadPoolExecutor for concurrent chunk processing
- Token-based chunking with configurable thresholds
- Handles tables without headers gracefully
⚡ PERFORMANCE:
- Process 1000+ row tables without timeout
- Parallel processing with up to 5 concurrent chunks
- Smart token estimation prevents LLM context overflow
- Optimized for providers like Groq for massive tables
🔧 CONFIGURATION:
- enable_chunking: Auto-handle large tables (default: True)
- chunk_token_threshold: When to split (default: 3000 tokens)
- min_rows_per_chunk: Meaningful chunk sizes (default: 10)
- max_parallel_chunks: Concurrent processing (default: 5)
📚 BACKWARD COMPATIBILITY:
- Existing code continues to work unchanged
- DefaultTableExtraction remains the default strategy
- Progressive enhancement approach
This is the future of web table extraction - handling everything from simple tables to massive, complex data grids with merged cells and nested structures. The chunking is completely transparent to users while providing unprecedented scalability.
The MemoryAdaptiveDispatcher was processing tasks sequentially despite
max_session_permit > 1 due to fetching only one task per event loop iteration.
This particularly affected raw:// URLs which complete in microseconds.
Changes:
- Replace single task fetch with greedy slot filling using get_nowait()
- Fill all available slots (up to max_session_permit) immediately
- Break on empty queue instead of waiting with timeout
This ensures proper parallelization for all task types, especially
ultra-fast operations like raw HTML processing.
- Add raw HTML URL validation alongside http/https checks
- Fix URL preprocessing logic to handle raw: and raw:// prefixes
- Update error message and add comprehensive test cases
- Remove deprecated API token authentication from all Docker examples
- Fix async job endpoints: /crawl -> /crawl/job for submission, /task/{id} -> /crawl/job/{id} for polling
- Fix sync endpoint: /crawl_sync -> /crawl (synchronous)
- Remove non-existent /crawl_direct endpoint
- Update request format to use new structure with browser_config and crawler_config
- Fix response handling for both async and sync calls
- Update extraction strategy format to use proper nested structure
- Add Ollama connectivity check before running tests
- Update test schemas and selectors for current website structures
This makes the Docker examples work out-of-the-box with the current API structure.
- Introduced a new section in SPONSORS.md to recognize the first 50 sponsors as Founding Sponsors.
- Updated README-first.md to include comprehensive project details, features, installation instructions, and advanced usage examples.
- Highlighted the recent version 0.7.0 release with new features and improvements.
- Added a sponsorship program with tiered benefits and a mission statement to promote data democratization.
- Add FUNDING.yml to enable sponsor button
- Add sponsor section to README with tier overview
- Create SPONSORS.md for sponsor recognition
- Set up 4 tiers: Believer, Builder, Growing Team, Data Infrastructure Partner
- Extract base href from <head><base> tag using XPath in _process_element method
- Use base URL as the primary URL for link normalization when present
- Add error handling with logging for malformed or problematic base tags
- Maintain backward compatibility when no base tag is present
- Add test to verify the functionality of the base tag extraction.
- Update Table-to-DataFrame Extraction example in README.md
- Replace old method of accessing tables via result.media directly with result.tables in the documentation
- Remove tables section from links & media page.
- Add tables section to crawler result page.
- Support LLM_PROVIDER env var to override default provider (openai/gpt-4o-mini)
- Add optional 'provider' parameter to API endpoints for per-request overrides
- Implement provider validation to ensure API keys exist
- Update documentation and examples with new configuration options
Closes the need to hardcode providers in config.yml
commit 2def6524cdacb69c72760bf55a41089257c0bb07
Author: ntohidi <nasrin@kidocode.com>
Date: Mon Aug 4 18:59:10 2025 +0800
refactor: consolidate WebScrapingStrategy to use LXML implementation only
BREAKING CHANGE: None - full backward compatibility maintained
This commit simplifies the content scraping architecture by removing the
redundant BeautifulSoup-based WebScrapingStrategy implementation and making
it an alias for LXMLWebScrapingStrategy.
Changes:
- Remove ~1000 lines of BeautifulSoup-based WebScrapingStrategy code
- Make WebScrapingStrategy an alias for LXMLWebScrapingStrategy
- Update LXMLWebScrapingStrategy to inherit directly from ContentScrapingStrategy
- Add required methods (scrap, ascrap, process_element, _log) to LXMLWebScrapingStrategy
- Maintain 100% backward compatibility - existing code continues to work
Code changes:
- crawl4ai/content_scraping_strategy.py: Remove WebScrapingStrategy class, add alias
- crawl4ai/async_configs.py: Remove WebScrapingStrategy from imports
- crawl4ai/__init__.py: Update imports to show alias relationship
- crawl4ai/types.py: Update type definitions
- crawl4ai/legacy/web_crawler.py: Update import to use alias
- tests/async/test_content_scraper_strategy.py: Update to use LXMLWebScrapingStrategy
- docs/examples/scraping_strategies_performance.py: Update to use single strategy
Documentation updates:
- docs/md_v2/core/content-selection.md: Update scraping modes section
- docs/md_v2/migration/webscraping-strategy-migration.md: Add migration guide
- CHANGELOG.md: Document the refactoring under [Unreleased]
Benefits:
- 10-20x faster HTML parsing for large documents
- Reduced memory usage and simplified codebase
- Consistent parsing behavior
- No migration required for existing users
All existing code using WebScrapingStrategy continues to work without
modification, while benefiting from LXML's superior performance.
Fix critical issue where unmatched URLs incorrectly used the first config instead of failing safely. Also clarify that configs without url_matcher match ALL URLs by design, and improve memory usage monitoring.
Bug fixes:
- Change select_config() to return None when no config matches instead of using first config
- Add proper error handling in dispatchers when no config matches a URL
- Return failed CrawlResult with "No matching configuration found" error message
- Fix is_match() to return True when url_matcher is None (matches all URLs)
- Import and use get_true_memory_usage_percent() for more accurate memory monitoring
Behavior clarification:
- CrawlerRunConfig with url_matcher=None matches ALL URLs (not nothing)
- This is the intended behavior for default/fallback configurations
- Enables clean pattern: specific configs first, default config last
Documentation updates:
- Clarify that configs without url_matcher match everything
- Explain "No matching configuration found" error when no default config
- Add examples showing proper default config usage
- Update all relevant docs: multi-url-crawling.md, arun_many.md, parameters.md
- Simplify API config examples by removing extraction_strategy
Demo and test updates:
- Update demo_multi_config_clean.py with commented default config to show behavior
- Change example URL to w3schools.com to demonstrate no-match scenario
- Uncomment all test URLs in test_multi_config.py for comprehensive testing
Breaking changes: None - this restores the intended behavior
This ensures URLs only get processed with appropriate configs, preventing
issues like HTML pages being processed with PDF extraction strategies.
