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Beautiful Soup

Beautiful Soup is a Python library used for web scraping and parsing HTML and XML documents. It provides an easy-to-use interface for navigating, searching, and modifying web page content. It is commonly used to extract data from websites by analyzing page structures and selecting elements based on tags, attributes, or CSS selectors.

Also known as: BS4 (Beautiful Soup 4)

Comparisons

  • Beautiful Soup vs. Scrapy: Beautiful Soup is simpler and better suited for small-scale parsing, while Scrapy is a full-fledged web scraping framework with built-in crawling capabilities.
  • Beautiful Soup vs. Selenium: Beautiful Soup extracts and processes static content, whereas Selenium interacts with dynamic web pages by automating browsers.

Pros

  • Easy to use and lightweight for simple web scraping tasks.
  • Works well with various parsers like lxml and html.parser.
  • Supports searching and modifying elements using tag names, attributes, and CSS selectors.

Cons

  • Not optimized for scraping large websites with multiple pages.
  • Cannot interact with JavaScript-rendered content (requires Selenium or Playwright for that).
  • Slower compared to full-featured web scraping frameworks like Scrapy.

Example

A developer extracts article titles from a news website using Beautiful Soup:


from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests


# Fetch webpage content
url = "https://example-news-site.com"
response = requests.get(url)


# Parse HTML
soup = BeautifulSoup(response.text, "html.parser")


# Extract article titles
titles = soup.find_all("h2", class_="article-title")


for title in titles:
    print(title.get_text())

In this example, Beautiful Soup fetches and parses the HTML of a news website, then extracts and prints all article titles found in <h2> tags with the class "article-title". This demonstrates its ability to navigate and extract specific content from web pages efficiently.

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