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

Chapter 5. Modifying Content Using Beautiful Soup

Beautiful Soup can be used effectively to search or navigate within an HTML/XML document. Apart from this, we can also use Beautiful Soup to change the content of an HTML/XML document. Modification of the content means the addition or deletion of a new tag, changing the tag name, altering tag attribute values, changing text content, and so on. This is useful in situations where we need to parse the HTML/XML document, change its structure, and write it back as an HTML/XML document with the modification.

Consider a case where we have an HTML document with a <table> tag holding around 1,000 or more rows (the <tr> tag ) with an existing set of two columns (the <td> tag ) per row. We want to add a new set of the two <td> tags to each row. It would be highly inappropriate to manually add these <td> tags for each of the <tr> tags. In this case, we can use Beautiful Soup to search or/and navigate through each of...