Beautiful Soup (HTML parser)

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[2], which is useful for web scraping.[1]

Beautiful Soup
Original author(s)Leonard Richardson
Stable release
4.9.1 / May 17, 2020 (2020-05-17)
Repository
Written inPython
PlatformPython
TypeHTML parser library, Web scraping
LicensePython Software Foundation License (Beautiful Soup 3 - an older version) MIT License 4+[1]
Websitewww.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/

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

This table summarizes the advantages and disadvantages of each parser library[1]

Parser Typical usage Advantages Disadvantages
Python’s html.parser BeautifulSoup(markup, "html.parser")
  • Decent speed
  • Lenient (As of Python 2.7.3 and 3.2.)
  • Not as fast as lxml, less lenient than html5lib.
lxml’s HTML parser BeautifulSoup(markup, "lxml")
  • Very fast
  • Lenient
  • External C dependency
lxml’s XML parser

BeautifulSoup(markup, "lxml-xml")
BeautifulSoup(markup, "xml")
  • Very fast
  • The only currently supported XML parser
  • External C dependency
html5lib BeautifulSoup(markup, "html5lib")
  • Extremely lenient
  • Parses pages the same way a web browser does
  • Creates valid HTML5
  • Very slow
  • External Python dependency

Release

Beautiful Soup 3 was the official release line of Beautiful Soup from May 2006 to March 2012. The current release is Beautiful Soup 4.9.1 (May 17, 2020). You can install Beautiful Soup 4 with pip install beautifulsoup4.

See also

References
  1. "Beautiful Soup website". Retrieved 18 April 2012. Beautiful Soup is licensed under the same terms as Python itself
  2. 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, retrieved 2020-04-11


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