2010-05-12 23:29:46 +02:00
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Beautiful Soup is a Python HTML/XML parser designed for quick turnaround
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projects like screen-scraping. Three features make it powerful:
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1. Beautiful Soup won't choke if you give it bad markup. It yields a
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parse tree that makes approximately as much sense as your original
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document. This is usually good enough to collect the data you need
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and run away.
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2. Beautiful Soup provides a few simple methods and Pythonic idioms for
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navigating, searching, and modifying a parse tree: a toolkit for
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dissecting a document and extracting what you need. You don't have to
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create a custom parser for each application.
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3. Beautiful Soup automatically converts incoming documents to Unicode and
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outgoing documents to UTF-8. You don't have to think about encodings,
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2011-03-04 22:34:52 +01:00
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unless the document doesn't specify an encoding and Beautiful Soup
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can't autodetect one. Then you just have to specify the original
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encoding.
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2010-05-12 23:29:46 +02:00
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Beautiful Soup parses anything you give it, and does the tree traversal
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stuff for you. You can tell it "Find all the links", or "Find all the links
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of class externalLink", or "Find all the links whose urls match "foo.com",
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or "Find the table heading that's got bold text, then give me that text."
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Valuable data that was once locked up in poorly-designed websites is now
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within your reach. Projects that would have taken hours take only minutes
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with Beautiful Soup.
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