Beautiful Soup (HTML parser)
| Original author(s) | Leonard Richardson |
|---|---|
| Initial release | 2004 |
| Stable release | 4.12.3[1] 
/ 17 January 2024 |
| Repository | |
| Written in | Python |
| Platform | Python |
| Type | HTML parser library, Web scraping |
| License | Python Software Foundation License (Beautiful Soup 3 - an older version) MIT License 4+[2] |
| Website | www |
Beautiful Soup is a Python package for parsing HTML and XML documents (including having malformed markup, i.e. non-closed tags, so named after tag soup). It creates a parse tree for parsed pages that can be used to extract data from HTML,[3] which is useful for web scraping.[2]
Beautiful Soup was started by Leonard Richardson, who continues to contribute to the project,[4] and is additionally supported by Tidelift, a paid subscription to open-source maintenance.[5]
It is available for Python 2.7 and Python 3.
Code example
#!/usr/bin/env python3
# Anchor extraction from HTML document
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
from urllib.request import urlopen
with urlopen('https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page') as response:
soup = BeautifulSoup(response, 'html.parser')
for anchor in soup.find_all('a'):
print(anchor.get('href', '/'))
Advantages and disadvantages of parsers
This table summarizes the advantages and disadvantages of each parser library[2]
| Parser | Typical usage | Advantages | Disadvantages |
|---|---|---|---|
| Python’s html.parser | BeautifulSoup(markup, "html.parser") |
|
|
| lxml’s HTML parser | BeautifulSoup(markup, "lxml") |
|
|
| lxml’s XML parser |
BeautifulSoup(markup, "lxml-xml") |
|
|
| html5lib | BeautifulSoup(markup, "html5lib") |
|
|
Release
Beautiful Soup 3 was the official release line of Beautiful Soup from May 2006 to March 2012. The current release is Beautiful Soup 4.x. Beautiful Soup 4 can be installed with pip install beautifulsoup4.
See also
References
- ^ "Changelog". Retrieved 18 January 2024.
- ^ a b c "Beautiful Soup website". Retrieved 18 April 2012.
Beautiful Soup is licensed under the same terms as Python itself
- ^ Hajba, Gábor László (2018), Hajba, Gábor László (ed.), "Using Beautiful Soup", Website Scraping with Python: Using BeautifulSoup and Scrapy, Apress, pp. 41–96, doi:10.1007/978-1-4842-3925-4_3, ISBN 978-1-4842-3925-4
- ^ "Code : Leonard Richardson". Launchpad. Retrieved 2020-09-19.
- ^ Tidelift. "beautifulsoup4 | pypi via the Tidelift Subscription". tidelift.com. Retrieved 2020-09-19.
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