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