Interesting. I clearly lack any knowledge in gumbo. But from what I understand from comment is >> benchmarking the gumbo-python bindings, it was 95%+ parsing,

Interesting. I clearly lack any knowledge in gumbo. But from what I understand from comment is >> benchmarking the gumbo-python bindings, it was 95%+ parsing, < 5% spent on tree construction 95% on parsing - this speeds up since its done in C instead of python - ok. 5% spent on tree construction. I was little surprised with this - I assumed dictionaries might help although construction (seem expensive) for tree but tree traversal becomes optimal. But as I write this, I find you have mentioned trees in question are of memory OFFSET types. That may explain why its quick. Else DOM styled trees (which I assumed) in C would be expensive to construct and traverse. Finally, this begs another question : memory offset trees ? How optimal are they in construction since without having knowledge of depth of a tag and its children-depth - this will be have to be a two time parse with some sort of data structure(tree) to maintain book keeping for a second time parse to construct memory offset tree. Can this be done in single parse ? Could you share some insight into this ?