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

Summary


In this chapter, we learned the different objects in the Beautiful Soup module. We understood how the HTML/XML document is converted to a BeautifulSoup object with the help of underlying TreeBuilders. We also had a look at the creation of BeautifulSoup by passing a string and a file object (for a local file and URL). Creating BeautifulSoup for XML parsing and the use of the features argument in the constructor were also explained. We saw how the different tags and texts within the HTML/XML document are represented as a Tag and NavigableString object in Beautiful Soup.

In the next chapter, we will learn the different searching methods, such as find(), find_all(), and find_next(), provided by Beautiful Soup. With the help of these searching methods, we will be able to get data out of the HTML/XML document, which is indeed the most powerful feature of Beautiful Soup.