Beautiful Soup is a popular Python library used for web scraping, and it provides an intuitive way to extract data from HTML and XML documents. This library makes it easy to navigate through web pages and scrape the desired information.
also: Intro to Web Scraping
To use Beautiful Soup, one must install the library using pip. Once installed, the library can be imported and the parsing process can begin. The parsing is done by creating a soup object from the HTML or XML file, using the BeautifulSoup constructor. Once the soup object is created, it provides various methods and attributes to navigate and search the document.
Beautiful Soup's primary strength is in its search functions, which include find() and find_all(). These functions can locate specific tags or attributes within the document, based on parameters such as tag name, attribute name, and attribute value. Beautiful Soup also supports various methods for manipulating the document, such as replace_with(), insert(), and extract(), which can modify the HTML or XML document and create new elements within it.
One of the main advantages of Beautiful Soup is its ability to handle malformed HTML and XML documents, which can be common on the web. This feature makes it easier to extract data from a wider range of web pages.
Beautiful Soup's user-friendly API and powerful search and manipulation functions make it a popular choice for developers and data scientists who want to extract data from web pages efficiently. It is a versatile and flexible tool that can be used for a wide variety of web scraping tasks.
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