Beautiful Soup

Beautiful Soup is a Python library used for web scraping and parsing HTML and XML documents. It creates parse trees from web page source files, enabling developers to extract and manipulate data easily. Key features include:

1. HTML and XML Parsing: Beautiful Soup parses both HTML and XML documents, providing a consistent interface for handling different markup languages.
2. Navigable Parse Tree: It creates a parse tree that allows developers to navigate and search through the document easily using methods like .find(), .find_all(), and CSS selectors.
3. Integration with Parsers: Beautiful Soup works with multiple parsers, such as lxml and html.parser, offering flexibility in terms of speed and accuracy of parsing.
4. Data Extraction: It simplifies the process of extracting data from web pages, making it easy to retrieve information like text, links, and attributes from the HTML structure.
5. Encoding Handling: Beautiful Soup handles different encodings automatically, ensuring the correct parsing of documents with various character sets.
6. Robust Error Handling: It is designed to be forgiving of malformed HTML, allowing it to parse even poorly formatted web pages effectively.

Beautiful Soup's ease of use and powerful features make it a popular choice for web scraping and data extraction tasks in Python.