What jsoup does
jsoup parses HTML from a string, file, or URL into a clean DOM, then gives you jQuery-like selection:
doc.select("div.price") returns matching elements, and you read their text or attributes from there. It also tidies malformed markup and can sanitize untrusted HTML. For straightforward extraction from static pages, it's concise and fast.When to use jsoup
Reach for jsoup when you're on a Java/JVM stack and scraping server-rendered or static pages - product listings, articles, tables. It's ideal for simple-to-medium jobs where the data is in the initial HTML. It is not the tool for JavaScript-heavy single-page apps, because it doesn't execute JavaScript.
jsoup's limits for modern scraping
jsoup parses HTML - it doesn't render JavaScript, rotate proxies, or handle anti-bot defenses. On protected sites you'll get a 403 or a Cloudflare challenge instead of the page, and on SPAs you'll get an empty shell. The common pattern is to fetch fully rendered, unblocked HTML through a web scraping API and then parse that HTML with jsoup.