What are some BeautifulSoup alternatives in Python?

by scrapecrow Oct 24, 2022

# beautifulsoup # python # css-selectors # xpath # data-parsing

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.

How to Parse XML

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Web Scraping With Ruby

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Parsing HTML with Xpath

Introduction to xpath in the context of web-scraping. How to extract data from HTML documents using xpath, best practices and available tools.

How to Parse Web Data with Python and Beautifulsoup

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BEAUTIFULSOUP

DATA-PARSING

PYTHON