What is Beautiful Soup?

Web scraping

Web scraping is a method of extracting data from web sites. It uses software to extract all the information available from the targeted site by simulating human behavior.

Beautiful Soup

Beautiful Soup is a Python library that makes it easy to scrape information from web pages. It sits atop an HTML or XML parser and provides Pythonic idioms for iterating, searching, and modifying the parse tree.

Uses of Beautiful Soup

The Beautiful Soup library helps with isolating titles and links from webpages. It can extract all of the text from ​HTML tags, and alter the HTML ​in the document with which we’re working.

Features of Beautiful Soup

Some key features that make beautiful soup unique are:

• Beautiful Soup provides a few simple methods and Pythonic idioms for navigating, searching, and modifying a parse tree.
• Beautiful Soup automatically converts incoming documents to Unicode and outgoing documents to UTF-8.
• Beautiful Soup sits on top of popular Python parsers like lxml and html5lib, which allows​ us to try out different parsing strategies or trade speed for flexibility.

More details can be found on the official ​website.