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Screen-scraping library

Project description

Beautiful Soup is a library that makes it easy to scrape information from web pages. It sits atop an HTML or XML parser, providing Pythonic idioms for iterating, searching, and modifying the parse tree.

Quick start

  >>> from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
  >>> soup = BeautifulSoup("<p>Some<b>bad<i>HTML")
  >>> print soup.prettify()
  <html>
   <body>
    <p>
     Some
     <b>
      bad
      <i>
       HTML
      </i>
     </b>
    </p>
   </body>
  </html>
  >>> soup.find(text="bad")
  u'bad'

  >>> soup.i
  <i>HTML</i>

  >>> soup = BeautifulSoup("<tag1>Some<tag2/>bad<tag3>XML", "xml")
  >>> print soup.prettify()
  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8">
  <tag1>
   Some
   <tag2 />
   bad
   <tag3>
    XML
   </tag3>
  </tag1>

To go beyond the basics, comprehensive documentation is available.

Links

Building the documentation

The bs4/doc/ directory contains full documentation in Sphinx format. Run make html in that directory to create HTML documentation.

Running the unit tests

Beautiful Soup supports unit test discovery from the project root directory:

 $ nosetests
 $ python -m unittest discover -s bs4 # Python 2.7 and up

If you checked out the source tree, you should see a script in the home directory called test-all-versions. This script will run the unit tests under Python 2.7, then create a temporary Python 3 conversion of the source and run the unit tests again under Python 3.

Project details


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