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.
What are some BeautifulSoup alternatives in Python?
Beautifulsoup is one of the most popular Python packages used in web scraping to parse HTML data. It's not the only library for this in Python though:
lxml
HTML parsing using CSS selectors or XPath selectors. Often faster than beautifulsoup and unlike bs4, lxml supports XPath selectors which are more powerful than CSS selectors. It's also usable as a beautifulsoup backend though bs4 doesn't support XPath selectors.
parsel (recommended)
UX wrapper around lxml essentially offering the same capabilities but streamlined for web scraping. This package is also used by scrapy web scraping framework
html5lib
Opinionated HTML5 compliant parser that will interpret HTML trees the closest to the way web browser interpret it. It's also usable as a beautifulsoup backend.
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