Book Image

Getting Started with Beautiful Soup

By : Vineeth G Nair
Book Image

Getting Started with Beautiful Soup

By: Vineeth G Nair

Overview of this book

Beautiful Soup is a Python library designed for quick turnaround projects like screen-scraping. Beautiful Soup provides a few simple methods and Pythonic idioms for navigating, searching, and modifying a parse tree: a toolkit for dissecting a document and extracting what you need without writing excess code for an application. It doesn't take much code to write an application using Beautiful Soup. Getting Started with Beautiful Soup is a practical guide to Beautiful Soup using Python. The book starts by walking you through the installation of each and every feature of Beautiful Soup using simple examples which include sample Python codes as well as diagrams and screenshots wherever required for better understanding. The book discusses the problems of how exactly you can get data out of a website and provides an easy solution with the help of a real website and sample code. Getting Started with Beautiful Soup goes over the different methods to install Beautiful Soup in both Linux and Windows systems. You will then learn about searching, navigating, content modification, encoding support, and output formatting with the help of examples and sample Python codes for each example so that you can try them out to get a better understanding. This book is a practical guide for scraping information from any website. If you want to learn how to efficiently scrape pages from websites, then this book is for you.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Getting Started with Beautiful Soup
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Creating a BeautifulSoup object


Creating a BeautifulSoup object is the starting point of any Beautiful Soup project. A BeautifulSoup object represents the input HTML/XML document used for its creation.

BeautifulSoup is created by passing a string or a file-like object (this can be an open handle to the files stored locally in our machine or a web page).

Creating a BeautifulSoup object from a string

A string can be passed to the BeautifulSoup constructor to create an object as follows:

helloworld = "<p>Hello World</p>"
soup_string = BeautifulSoup(helloworld)

Tip

Downloading the example code

You can download the example code files for all Packt books you have purchased from your account at http://www.packtpub.com. If you purchased this book elsewhere, you can visit http://www.packtpub.com/support and register to have the files e-mailed directly to you.

The previous code will create the BeautifulSoup object based on the input string helloworld. We can see that the input has been treated...