Beautiful Soup (HTML parser)

Beautiful Soup is a Python package for parsing HTML and XML documents, including those with malformed markup. It creates a parse tree for documents that can be used to extract data from HTML,[3] which is useful for web scraping.[2][4]

Beautiful Soup
Original author(s)Leonard Richardson
Initial release2004 (2004)
Stable release
4.12.3[1] Edit this on Wikidata / 17 January 2024 (17 January 2024)
Repository
Written inPython
PlatformPython
TypeHTML parser library, Web scraping
License
Websitewww.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/

Beautiful Soup was started by Leonard Richardson, who continues to contribute to the project,[5] and is additionally supported by Tidelift, a paid subscription to open-source maintenance.[6]

Code example

Beautiful Soup represents parsed data as a tree which can be searched and iterated over with ordinary Python loops.[7] The example below uses the Python standard library's urllib[8] 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', '/'))

History

Beautiful Soup is named both after a poem in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland[9] and tag soup.[10]

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.[11]

See also
  • Comparison of HTML parsers
  • jsoup
  • Nokogiri

References
  1. Error: Unable to display the reference properly. See the documentation for details.
  2. "Beautiful Soup website". Retrieved 18 April 2012. Beautiful Soup is licensed under the same terms as Python itself
  3. 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
  4. Python, Real. "Beautiful Soup: Build a Web Scraper With Python – Real Python". realpython.com. Retrieved 2023-06-01.
  5. "Code : Leonard Richardson". Launchpad. Retrieved 2020-09-19.
  6. Tidelift. "beautifulsoup4 | pypi via the Tidelift Subscription". tidelift.com. Retrieved 2020-09-19.
  7. "How To Scrape Web Pages with Beautiful Soup and Python 3 | DigitalOcean". www.digitalocean.com. Retrieved 2023-06-01.
  8. Python, Real. "Python's urllib.request for HTTP Requests – Real Python". realpython.com. Retrieved 2023-06-01.
  9. makcorps (2022-12-13). "BeautifulSoup tutorial: Let's Scrape Web Pages with Python". Retrieved 2024-01-24.
  10. "Python Web Scraping". Udacity. 2021-02-11. Retrieved 2024-01-24.
  11. Richardson, Leonard (7 Sep 2021). "Beautiful Soup 4.10.0". beautifulsoup. Google Groups. Retrieved 27 September 2022.
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