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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.

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 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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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 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 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 find HTML elements by attribute using BeautifulSoup?

To find HTML node by a specific attribute value in BeautifulSoup the attribute match parameter can be used in the find() methods. Here's how.

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What are some BeautifulSoup alternatives in Python?

BeautifulSoup is a popular HTML library for Python. It's most popular alternatives are lxml, parsel and html5lib. Here's how they differ from bs4.

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