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 (versions 4 and up)[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][4]. Beautiful Soup is most useful for websites that send the entire html document when requested. For sites that dynamically compose the html in the browser with javascript, often Beautiful Soup would be used in conjunction with a library like Selenium to simulate a web browser and obtain the final html code[5].
Beautiful Soup was started by Leonard Richardson, who continues to contribute to the project,[6] and is additionally supported by Tidelift, a paid subscription to open-source maintenance.[7]
Code example
Beautiful Soup represents parsed data as a tree which can be searched and iterated over with ordinary Python loops.[8] The example below uses the Python standard library's urllib[9] to load Wikipedia's main page, then uses Beautiful Soup to parse the document and search for all links within.
#!/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', '/'))
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.
In 2021, Python 2.7 support was retired and the release 4.9.3 was the last to support Python 2.7.[10]
See also
References
- ^ "Changelog". Retrieved 18 January 2024.
- ^ a b "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
- ^ Python, Real. "Beautiful Soup: Build a Web Scraper With Python – Real Python". realpython.com. Retrieved 2023-06-01.
- ^ Python Beautiful Soup[1]
- ^ "Code : Leonard Richardson". Launchpad. Retrieved 2020-09-19.
- ^ Tidelift. "beautifulsoup4 | pypi via the Tidelift Subscription". tidelift.com. Retrieved 2020-09-19.
- ^ "How To Scrape Web Pages with Beautiful Soup and Python 3 | DigitalOcean". www.digitalocean.com. Retrieved 2023-06-01.
- ^ Python, Real. "Python's urllib.request for HTTP Requests – Real Python". realpython.com. Retrieved 2023-06-01.
- ^ Richardson, Leonard (7 Sep 2021). "Beautiful Soup 4.10.0". beautifulsoup. Google Groups. Retrieved 27 September 2022.
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