Beautiful Soup

Founded by Leonard Richardson in 2004

Extract and navigate data from HTML and XML files

Pricing model

Free

Rating

★ Very Positive

Time to value

> 10 Hours

You can use Beautiful Soup to parse structured web pages and XML files directly within Python. It converts messy markup into a clean parse tree of objects that you can navigate, search, and modify using familiar syntax. You can easily locate specific elements using tag names, attributes, CSS classes, or text content. The library integrates with popular parsers like lxml and html5lib, handles incoming character encodings automatically, and lets you extract text or links with minimal code.

What Beautiful Soup does

Find HTML tags by tag name and attribute valuesExtract all links from anchor tags on a pagePull raw text content from nested HTML elementsModify HTML tag attributes or replace tag namesPrettify raw markup into cleanly formatted treesNavigate parent, sibling, and child nodes within parsed markupParses both HTML and XML documents into navigable Python object treesWorks interchangeably with multiple parsers like lxml, html5lib, and standard library html.parserConverts incoming documents and HTML entities into Unicode characters automaticallyOffers simple search methods to find tags by name, attribute, or CSS classProvides navigation helpers to move up, down, or sideways through the DOM treeExtracts plain text while stripping out all surrounding tagsPermits inline modification and deletion of document tags and attributes