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.
>>> 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")
'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.
Beautiful Soup's support for Python 2 was discontinued on December 31, 2020: one year after the sunset date for Python 2 itself. From this point onward, new Beautiful Soup development will exclusively target Python 3. The final release of Beautiful Soup 4 to support Python 2 was 4.9.3.
If you use Beautiful Soup as part of your professional work, please consider a Tidelift subscription. This will support many of the free software projects your organization depends on, not just Beautiful Soup.
If you use Beautiful Soup for personal projects, the best way to say thank you is to read Tool Safety, a zine I wrote about what Beautiful Soup has taught me about software development.
The bs4/doc/ directory contains full documentation in Sphinx
format. Run make html in that directory to create HTML
documentation.
Beautiful Soup supports unit test discovery from the project root directory:
$ nosetests
$ python3 -m unittest discover -s bs4