BeautifulSoup Knowledgebase

BeautifulSoup is a Python library for parsing HTML and XML documents. It creates parse trees from page source codes that can be used to extract data easily using Pythonic functions and methods or CSS selectors. It's very popular in web scraping due to great developer experience and ease of use.

Compared to other libraries like parse beautifulsoup is missing XPath selector support which is a very powerful way to select elements in web scraped HTML documents. However, bs4 has a very powerful CSS selector support which is often enough for most scraping tasks and the xpath-css gap can be filled in using beautifulsoup's .find() and .find_all() methods.

How to Parse Web Data with Python and Beautifulsoup

Beautifulsoup is one the most popular libraries in web scraping. In this tutorial, we'll take a hand-on overview of how to use it, what is it good for and explore a real -life web scraping example.

How to Parse Web Data with Python and Beautifulsoup

Here are some frequently asked questions about BeautifulSoup and web scraping 👇

Scrapy vs Beautifulsoup - what's the difference?

Scrapy and BeautifulSoup are two popular web scraping libraries though very different. Scrapy is a framework while beautifulsoup is a HTML parser

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How to turn HTML to text in Python?

To turn HTML data to text in Python we can use BeautifulSoup's get_text() method which strips away HTML data and leaves text as is. Here's how.

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How to find elements without a specific attribute in BeautifulSoup?

To find HTML elements that do NOT contains a specific attribute we can use regular expression matching or lambda functions. Here's how to do it.

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How to find HTML elements by multiple tags with BeautifulSoup?

To find HTML elements by one of many different element names we can use list of tags in find() methods or CSS selectors. Here's how to do it.

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How to find sibling HTML nodes using BeautifulSoup and Python?

To find sibling HTML element nodes using BeautifulSoup the find_next_sibling() method can be used or CSS selector ~. Here's how to do it in Python.

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How to select values between two nodes in BeautifulSoup and Python?

To select HTML element located between two HTML elements using BeautifulSoup the find_next_sibling() method can be used. Here's how to do it.

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Can I used XPath selectors in BeautifulSoup?

BeautilfulSoup for Python doesn't support XPath selectors but there are popular alternatives to fill in this niche. Here are some.

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How to find all links using BeautifulSoup and Python?

To find all links in the HTML pages using BeautifulSoup and Python the find_all() method can be used. Here's how to do it.

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