Beautiful Soup
Original author(s)Leonard Richardson
Initial release2004 (2004)
Stable release
4.12.2[1] Edit this on Wikidata / 7 April 2023 (7 April 2023)
Repository
Written inPython
PlatformPython
TypeHTML parser library, Web scraping
LicensePython Software Foundation License (Beautiful Soup 3 - an older version)
MIT License (versions 4 and up)[2]
Websitewww.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/

Beautiful Soup is a Python package for parsing HTML and XML documents (including having malformed markup, i.e. non-closed tags, so named after tag soup). It creates a parse tree for parsed pages that can be used to extract data from HTML,[3] which is useful for web scraping.[2][4]

Beautiful Soup was started by Leonard Richardson, who continues to contribute to the project,[5] and is additionally supported by Tidelift, a paid subscription to open-source maintenance.[6]

Code example

Beautiful Soup represents parsed data as a tree which can be searched and iterated over with ordinary Python loops.[7] The example below uses the Python standard library's urllib[8] to load Wikipedia's main page, then uses Beautiful Soup to parse the document and search for all links within. 

#!/usr/bin/env python3
# Anchor extraction from HTML document
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
from urllib.request import urlopen
with urlopen('https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page') as response:
    soup = BeautifulSoup(response, 'html.parser')
    for anchor in soup.find_all('a'):
        print(anchor.get('href', '/'))

Release

Beautiful Soup 3 was the official release line of Beautiful Soup from May 2006 to March 2012. The current release is Beautiful Soup 4.x. Beautiful Soup 4 can be installed with pip install beautifulsoup4.

In 2021, Python 2.7 support was retired and the release 4.9.3 was the last to support Python 2.7.[9]

See also

References

  1. ↑ Error: Unable to display the reference properly. See the documentation for details.
  2. 1 2 "Beautiful Soup website". Retrieved 18 April 2012. Beautiful Soup is licensed under the same terms as Python itself
  3. ↑ Hajba, Gábor László (2018), Hajba, Gábor László (ed.), "Using Beautiful Soup", Website Scraping with Python: Using BeautifulSoup and Scrapy, Apress, pp. 41–96, doi:10.1007/978-1-4842-3925-4_3, ISBN 978-1-4842-3925-4
  4. ↑ Python, Real. "Beautiful Soup: Build a Web Scraper With Python – Real Python". realpython.com. Retrieved 2023-06-01.
  5. ↑ "Code : Leonard Richardson". Launchpad. Retrieved 2020-09-19.
  6. ↑ Tidelift. "beautifulsoup4 | pypi via the Tidelift Subscription". tidelift.com. Retrieved 2020-09-19.
  7. ↑ "How To Scrape Web Pages with Beautiful Soup and Python 3 | DigitalOcean". www.digitalocean.com. Retrieved 2023-06-01.
  8. ↑ Python, Real. "Python's urllib.request for HTTP Requests – Real Python". realpython.com. Retrieved 2023-06-01.
  9. ↑ Richardson, Leonard (7 Sep 2021). "Beautiful Soup 4.10.0". beautifulsoup. Google Groups. Retrieved 27 September 2022.


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