Module BeautifulSoup

source code

Beautiful Soup
Elixir and Tonic
"The Screen-Scraper's Friend"
http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/

Beautiful Soup parses a (possibly invalid) XML or HTML document into a
tree representation. It provides methods and Pythonic idioms that make
it easy to navigate, search, and modify the tree.

A well-formed XML/HTML document yields a well-formed data
structure. An ill-formed XML/HTML document yields a correspondingly
ill-formed data structure. If your document is only locally
well-formed, you can use this library to find and process the
well-formed part of it.

Beautiful Soup works with Python 2.2 and up. It has no external
dependencies, but you'll have more success at converting data to UTF-8
if you also install these three packages:

* chardet, for auto-detecting character encodings
  http://chardet.feedparser.org/
* cjkcodecs and iconv_codec, which add more encodings to the ones supported
  by stock Python.
  http://cjkpython.i18n.org/

Beautiful Soup defines classes for two main parsing strategies:

 * BeautifulStoneSoup, for parsing XML, SGML, or your domain-specific
   language that kind of looks like XML.

 * BeautifulSoup, for parsing run-of-the-mill HTML code, be it valid
   or invalid. This class has web browser-like heuristics for
   obtaining a sensible parse tree in the face of common HTML errors.

Beautiful Soup also defines a class (UnicodeDammit) for autodetecting
the encoding of an HTML or XML document, and converting it to
Unicode. Much of this code is taken from Mark Pilgrim's Universal Feed Parser.

For more than you ever wanted to know about Beautiful Soup, see the
documentation:
http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/documentation.html

Here, have some legalese:

Copyright (c) 2004-2009, Leonard Richardson

All rights reserved.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are
met:

  * Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
    notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.

  * Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above
    copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following
    disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided
    with the distribution.

  * Neither the name of the the Beautiful Soup Consortium and All
    Night Kosher Bakery nor the names of its contributors may be
    used to endorse or promote products derived from this software
    without specific prior written permission.

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS
"AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT
LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR
A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT OWNER OR
CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL,
EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO,
PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR
PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING
NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS
SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE, DAMMIT.