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Beautiful Soup: Parsing HTML and XML
Beautiful Soup is a Python library designed for parsing HTML and XML documents. It creates a parse tree for parsed pages which can be used to extract data from HTML, which is useful for web scraping.
Key Features & Why it's Useful:
- Parses Messy HTML: Beautiful Soup is very tolerant of poorly formatted HTML, which is common on the web. It can handle broken tags and invalid markup.
- Navigates the Parse Tree: It provides simple ways to navigate the parsed HTML or XML document, allowing you to find specific elements based on tags, attributes, or text content.
- Finds Elements Easily: You can use methods like find() and find_all() to locate elements within the document.
- Extracts Data: It allows you to easily extract data from HTML elements, such as text, attribute values, and more.
- Supports Multiple Parsers: Beautiful Soup can work with different HTML parsers (like html.parser, lxml, and html5lib), giving you flexibility in terms of performance and features.
- Often Used with Requests: Beautiful Soup is frequently used in conjunction with the Requests library to fetch HTML content from websites and then parse it.
Simple Example: (Parsing HTML and extracting a title)
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests
# Fetch HTML content from a website
url = 'https://www.example.com'
response = requests.get(url)
html_content = response.content
# Create a BeautifulSoup object
soup = BeautifulSoup(html_content, 'html.parser')
# Find the title tag
title_tag = soup.find('title')
# Extract the text from the title tag
title = title_tag.text
print(title) # Output: Example Domain
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