Beautiful Soup is a Python library designed for parsing HTML and XML documents. It makes it easy to navigate, search, and modify the parse tree of web pages. Beautiful Soup is widely used for web scraping, data extraction, and cleaning HTML content from websites. It works well with other libraries like requests to fetch web pages and provides a simple, Pythonic interface to handle complex HTML structures.
Installation:
pip install beautifulsoup4
Example usage:
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
html_doc = "<html><body><h1>Hello World</h1></body></html>"
soup = BeautifulSoup(html_doc, "html.parser")
print(soup.h1.text)
PyPI page: https://pypi.org/project/beautifulsoup4/
GitHub page: https://github.com/wention/BeautifulSoup4
3 Project Ideas:
- Scrape news headlines from online news websites.
- Extract product information and prices from e-commerce sites.
- Build a web crawler to collect and analyze content from multiple pages.
Top comments (1)
When you're diving into big web scraping projects with Beautiful Soup, there are a few pro tips to keep in mind. First off, always use a solid parser like lxml for speed, and make sure you're paginating requests to keep the server chill and avoid crashing it. If you're dealing with dynamic content, you’ll need to bring in Selenium or Playwright to get the page rendered before passing it to Beautiful Soup. Scraping messy HTML can get tricky, but using parsers like lxml or html.parser helps you tackle those wonky tags. If you're working with the scraped data, throw in Pandas to analyze it, or SQLite to save it for later.