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")
u'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.
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
$ python -m unittest discover -s bs4 # Python 2.7 and up
If you checked out the source tree, you should see a script in the home directory called test-all-versions. This script will run the unit tests under Python 2.7, then create a temporary Python 3 conversion of the source and run the unit tests again under Python 3.