The Dormouse's story
Once upon a time there were three little sisters; and their names were Elsie, Lacie and Tillie; and they lived at the bottom of a well.
...
""" Running the "three sisters" document through Beautiful Soup gives us a ``BeautifulSoup`` object, which represents the document as a nested data structure:: from bs4 import BeautifulSoup soup = BeautifulSoup(html_doc, 'html.parser') print(soup.prettify()) # # ## # The Dormouse's story # #
## Once upon a time there were three little sisters; and their names were # # Elsie # # , # # Lacie # # and # # Tillie # # ; and they lived at the bottom of a well. #
## ... #
# # Here are some simple ways to navigate that data structure:: soup.title #The Dormouse's story
soup.p['class'] # u'title' soup.a # Elsie soup.find_all('a') # [Elsie, # Lacie, # Tillie] soup.find(id="link3") # Tillie One common task is extracting all the URLs found within a page's tags:: for link in soup.find_all('a'): print(link.get('href')) # http://example.com/elsie # http://example.com/lacie # http://example.com/tillie Another common task is extracting all the text from a page:: print(soup.get_text()) # The Dormouse's story # # The Dormouse's story # # Once upon a time there were three little sisters; and their names were # Elsie, # Lacie and # Tillie; # and they lived at the bottom of a well. # # ... Does this look like what you need? If so, read on. Installing Beautiful Soup ========================= If you're using a recent version of Debian or Ubuntu Linux, you can install Beautiful Soup with the system package manager: :kbd:`$ apt-get install python-bs4` (for Python 2) :kbd:`$ apt-get install python3-bs4` (for Python 3) Beautiful Soup 4 is published through PyPi, so if you can't install it with the system packager, you can install it with ``easy_install`` or ``pip``. The package name is ``beautifulsoup4``, and the same package works on Python 2 and Python 3. Make sure you use the right version of ``pip`` or ``easy_install`` for your Python version (these may be named ``pip3`` and ``easy_install3`` respectively if you're using Python 3). :kbd:`$ easy_install beautifulsoup4` :kbd:`$ pip install beautifulsoup4` (The ``BeautifulSoup`` package is probably `not` what you want. That's the previous major release, `Beautiful Soup 3`_. Lots of software uses BS3, so it's still available, but if you're writing new code you should install ``beautifulsoup4``.) If you don't have ``easy_install`` or ``pip`` installed, you can `download the Beautiful Soup 4 source tarballExtremely boldAttributes ^^^^^^^^^^ A tag may have any number of attributes. The tag ```` has an attribute "id" whose value is "boldest". You can access a tag's attributes by treating the tag like a dictionary:: tag['id'] # u'boldest' You can access that dictionary directly as ``.attrs``:: tag.attrs # {u'id': 'boldest'} You can add, remove, and modify a tag's attributes. Again, this is done by treating the tag as a dictionary:: tag['id'] = 'verybold' tag['another-attribute'] = 1 tag # del tag['id'] del tag['another-attribute'] tag # tag['id'] # KeyError: 'id' print(tag.get('id')) # None .. _multivalue: Multi-valued attributes &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& HTML 4 defines a few attributes that can have multiple values. HTML 5 removes a couple of them, but defines a few more. The most common multi-valued attribute is ``class`` (that is, a tag can have more than one CSS class). Others include ``rel``, ``rev``, ``accept-charset``, ``headers``, and ``accesskey``. Beautiful Soup presents the value(s) of a multi-valued attribute as a list:: css_soup = BeautifulSoup('') css_soup.p['class'] # ["body"] css_soup = BeautifulSoup('') css_soup.p['class'] # ["body", "strikeout"] If an attribute `looks` like it has more than one value, but it's not a multi-valued attribute as defined by any version of the HTML standard, Beautiful Soup will leave the attribute alone:: id_soup = BeautifulSoup('') id_soup.p['id'] # 'my id' When you turn a tag back into a string, multiple attribute values are consolidated:: rel_soup = BeautifulSoup('
Back to the homepage
') rel_soup.a['rel'] # ['index'] rel_soup.a['rel'] = ['index', 'contents'] print(rel_soup.p) #Back to the homepage
You can disable this by passing ``multi_valued_attributes=None`` as a keyword argument into the ``BeautifulSoup`` constructor:: no_list_soup = BeautifulSoup('', 'html', multi_valued_attributes=None) no_list_soup.p['class'] # u'body strikeout' You can use ```get_attribute_list`` to get a value that's always a list, whether or not it's a multi-valued atribute:: id_soup.p.get_attribute_list('id') # ["my id"] If you parse a document as XML, there are no multi-valued attributes:: xml_soup = BeautifulSoup('', 'xml') xml_soup.p['class'] # u'body strikeout' Again, you can configure this using the ``multi_valued_attributes`` argument:: class_is_multi= { '*' : 'class'} xml_soup = BeautifulSoup('', 'xml', multi_valued_attributes=class_is_multi) xml_soup.p['class'] # [u'body', u'strikeout'] You probably won't need to do this, but if you do, use the defaults as a guide. They implement the rules described in the HTML specification:: from bs4.builder import builder_registry builder_registry.lookup('html').DEFAULT_CDATA_LIST_ATTRIBUTES ``NavigableString`` ------------------- A string corresponds to a bit of text within a tag. Beautiful Soup uses the ``NavigableString`` class to contain these bits of text:: tag.string # u'Extremely bold' type(tag.string) #No longer bold``NavigableString`` supports most of the features described in `Navigating the tree`_ and `Searching the tree`_, but not all of them. In particular, since a string can't contain anything (the way a tag may contain a string or another tag), strings don't support the ``.contents`` or ``.string`` attributes, or the ``find()`` method. If you want to use a ``NavigableString`` outside of Beautiful Soup, you should call ``unicode()`` on it to turn it into a normal Python Unicode string. If you don't, your string will carry around a reference to the entire Beautiful Soup parse tree, even when you're done using Beautiful Soup. This is a big waste of memory. ``BeautifulSoup`` ----------------- The ``BeautifulSoup`` object represents the parsed document as a whole. For most purposes, you can treat it as a :ref:`Tag` object. This means it supports most of the methods described in `Navigating the tree`_ and `Searching the tree`_. You can also pass a ``BeautifulSoup`` object into one of the methods defined in `Modifying the tree`_, just as you would a :ref:`Tag`. This lets you do things like combine two parsed documents:: doc = BeautifulSoup("
The Dormouse's story
Once upon a time there were three little sisters; and their names were Elsie, Lacie and Tillie; and they lived at the bottom of a well.
...
""" from bs4 import BeautifulSoup soup = BeautifulSoup(html_doc, 'html.parser') I'll use this as an example to show you how to move from one part of a document to another. Going down ---------- Tags may contain strings and other tags. These elements are the tag's `children`. Beautiful Soup provides a lot of different attributes for navigating and iterating over a tag's children. Note that Beautiful Soup strings don't support any of these attributes, because a string can't have children. Navigating using tag names ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ The simplest way to navigate the parse tree is to say the name of the tag you want. If you want the tag, just say ``soup.head``:: soup.head #The Dormouse's story
An HTML parser takes this string of characters and turns it into a series of events: "open an tag", "open a tag", "open aThe Dormouse's story
Once upon a time there were three little sisters; and their names were Elsie, Lacie and Tillie; and they lived at the bottom of a well.
...
""" from bs4 import BeautifulSoup soup = BeautifulSoup(html_doc, 'html.parser') By passing in a filter to an argument like ``find_all()``, you can zoom in on the parts of the document you're interested in. Kinds of filters ---------------- Before talking in detail about ``find_all()`` and similar methods, I want to show examples of different filters you can pass into these methods. These filters show up again and again, throughout the search API. You can use them to filter based on a tag's name, on its attributes, on the text of a string, or on some combination of these. .. _a string: A string ^^^^^^^^ The simplest filter is a string. Pass a string to a search method and Beautiful Soup will perform a match against that exact string. This code finds all the tags in the document:: soup.find_all('b') # [The Dormouse's story] If you pass in a byte string, Beautiful Soup will assume the string is encoded as UTF-8. You can avoid this by passing in a Unicode string instead. .. _a regular expression: A regular expression ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ If you pass in a regular expression object, Beautiful Soup will filter against that regular expression using its ``search()`` method. This code finds all the tags whose names start with the letter "b"; in this case, the tag and the tag:: import re for tag in soup.find_all(re.compile("^b")): print(tag.name) # body # b This code finds all the tags whose names contain the letter 't':: for tag in soup.find_all(re.compile("t")): print(tag.name) # html # title .. _a list: A list ^^^^^^ If you pass in a list, Beautiful Soup will allow a string match against `any` item in that list. This code finds all the tags `and` all the tags:: soup.find_all(["a", "b"]) # [The Dormouse's story, # Elsie, # Lacie, # Tillie] .. _the value True: ``True`` ^^^^^^^^ The value ``True`` matches everything it can. This code finds `all` the tags in the document, but none of the text strings:: for tag in soup.find_all(True): print(tag.name) # html # head # title # body # p # b # p # a # a # a # p .. a function: A function ^^^^^^^^^^ If none of the other matches work for you, define a function that takes an element as its only argument. The function should return ``True`` if the argument matches, and ``False`` otherwise. Here's a function that returns ``True`` if a tag defines the "class" attribute but doesn't define the "id" attribute:: def has_class_but_no_id(tag): return tag.has_attr('class') and not tag.has_attr('id') Pass this function into ``find_all()`` and you'll pick up all thetags:: soup.find_all(has_class_but_no_id) # [
The Dormouse's story
, #Once upon a time there were...
, #...
] This function only picks up the tags. It doesn't pick up the
tags, because those tags define both "class" and "id". It doesn't pick
up tags like and The Dormouse's story
tag with the CSS class "title"? Let's look at the arguments to ``find_all()``. .. _name: The ``name`` argument ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Pass in a value for ``name`` and you'll tell Beautiful Soup to only consider tags with certain names. Text strings will be ignored, as will tags whose names that don't match. This is the simplest usage:: soup.find_all("title") # [
The Dormouse's story
] def has_six_characters(css_class): return css_class is not None and len(css_class) == 6 soup.find_all(class_=has_six_characters) # [Elsie, # Lacie, # Tillie] :ref:`RememberOnce upon a time there were three little sisters; and their names were # Elsie, # Lacie and # Tillie; # and they lived at the bottom of a well.
a_string.find_parents("p", class="title") # [] One of the three tags is the direct parent of the string in question, so our search finds it. One of the threetags is an indirect parent of the string, and our search finds that as well. There's a
tag with the CSS class "title" `somewhere` in the
document, but it's not one of this string's parents, so we can't find
it with ``find_parents()``.
You may have made the connection between ``find_parent()`` and
``find_parents()``, and the `.parent`_ and `.parents`_ attributes
mentioned earlier. The connection is very strong. These search methods
actually use ``.parents`` to iterate over all the parents, and check
each one against the provided filter to see if it matches.
``find_next_siblings()`` and ``find_next_sibling()``
----------------------------------------------------
Signature: find_next_siblings(:ref:`name ... The Dormouse's story ... tag in the document showed up, even though it's not in
the same part of the tree as the tag we started from. For these
methods, all that matters is that an element match the filter, and
show up later in the document than the starting element.
``find_all_previous()`` and ``find_previous()``
-----------------------------------------------
Signature: find_all_previous(:ref:`name Once upon a time there were three little sisters; ... The Dormouse's story tag that contains the tag we started
with. This shouldn't be too surprising: we're looking at all the tags
that show up earlier in the document than the one we started with. A
tag that contains an tag must have shown up before the
tag it contains.
CSS selectors
-------------
As of version 4.7.0, Beautiful Soup supports most CSS4 selectors via
the `SoupSieve ... I wish I was bold. I wish I was bold. A one A one, a two
# A one
# , a two
#
# A one, a two
# The law firm of Dewey, Cheatem, & Howe The law firm of Dewey, Cheatem, & Howe Il a dit <<Sacré bleu!>>
# Il a dit <<Sacré bleu!>>
#
# Il a dit <<Sacré bleu!>>
#
# Il a dit <
# IL A DIT <Extremely bold
del tag['class']
del tag['id']
tag
# Extremely bold
Modifying ``.string``
---------------------
If you set a tag's ``.string`` attribute to a new string, the tag's contents are
replaced with that string::
markup = 'I linked to example.com'
soup = BeautifulSoup(markup)
tag = soup.a
tag.string = "New link text."
tag
# New link text.
Be careful: if the tag contained other tags, they and all their
contents will be destroyed.
``append()``
------------
You can add to a tag's contents with ``Tag.append()``. It works just
like calling ``.append()`` on a Python list::
soup = BeautifulSoup("Foo")
soup.a.append("Bar")
soup
# FooBar
soup.a.contents
# [u'Foo', u'Bar']
``extend()``
------------
Starting in Beautiful Soup 4.7.0, ``Tag`` also supports a method
called ``.extend()``, which works just like calling ``.extend()`` on a
Python list::
soup = BeautifulSoup("Soup")
soup.a.extend(["'s", " ", "on"])
soup
# Soup's on
soup.a.contents
# [u'Soup', u''s', u' ', u'on']
``NavigableString()`` and ``.new_tag()``
-------------------------------------------------
If you need to add a string to a document, no problem--you can pass a
Python string in to ``append()``, or you can call the ``NavigableString``
constructor::
soup = BeautifulSoup("")
tag = soup.b
tag.append("Hello")
new_string = NavigableString(" there")
tag.append(new_string)
tag
# Hello there.
tag.contents
# [u'Hello', u' there']
If you want to create a comment or some other subclass of
``NavigableString``, just call the constructor::
from bs4 import Comment
new_comment = Comment("Nice to see you.")
tag.append(new_comment)
tag
# Hello there
tag.contents
# [u'Hello', u' there', u'Nice to see you.']
(This is a new feature in Beautiful Soup 4.4.0.)
What if you need to create a whole new tag? The best solution is to
call the factory method ``BeautifulSoup.new_tag()``::
soup = BeautifulSoup("")
original_tag = soup.b
new_tag = soup.new_tag("a", href="http://www.example.com")
original_tag.append(new_tag)
original_tag
#
new_tag.string = "Link text."
original_tag
# Link text.
Only the first argument, the tag name, is required.
``insert()``
------------
``Tag.insert()`` is just like ``Tag.append()``, except the new element
doesn't necessarily go at the end of its parent's
``.contents``. It'll be inserted at whatever numeric position you
say. It works just like ``.insert()`` on a Python list::
markup = 'I linked to example.com'
soup = BeautifulSoup(markup)
tag = soup.a
tag.insert(1, "but did not endorse ")
tag
# I linked to but did not endorse example.com
tag.contents
# [u'I linked to ', u'but did not endorse', example.com]
``insert_before()`` and ``insert_after()``
------------------------------------------
The ``insert_before()`` method inserts tags or strings immediately
before something else in the parse tree::
soup = BeautifulSoup("stop")
tag = soup.new_tag("i")
tag.string = "Don't"
soup.b.string.insert_before(tag)
soup.b
# Don'tstop
The ``insert_after()`` method inserts tags or strings immediately
following something else in the parse tree::
div = soup.new_tag('div')
div.string = 'ever'
soup.b.i.insert_after(" you ", div)
soup.b
# Don't you
")
print(soup.encode(formatter="html"))
#
print(soup.encode(formatter="html5"))
#
If you pass in ``formatter=None``, Beautiful Soup will not modify
strings at all on output. This is the fastest option, but it may lead
to Beautiful Soup generating invalid HTML/XML, as in these examples::
print(soup.prettify(formatter=None))
#
#
#
tag. This parser also adds an empty
tag to the document. Here's the same document parsed with Python's built-in HTML parser:: BeautifulSoup("", "html.parser") # Like html5lib, this parser ignores the closing tag. Unlike html5lib, this parser makes no attempt to create a well-formed HTML document by adding a tag. Unlike lxml, it doesn't even bother to add an tag. Since the document "" is invalid, none of these techniques is the "correct" way to handle it. The html5lib parser uses techniques that are part of the HTML5 standard, so it has the best claim on being the "correct" way, but all three techniques are legitimate. Differences between parsers can affect your script. If you're planning on distributing your script to other people, or running it on multiple machines, you should specify a parser in the ``BeautifulSoup`` constructor. That will reduce the chances that your users parse a document differently from the way you parse it. Encodings ========= Any HTML or XML document is written in a specific encoding like ASCII or UTF-8. But when you load that document into Beautiful Soup, you'll discover it's been converted to Unicode:: markup = "Sacr\xe9 bleu!
''' soup = BeautifulSoup(markup) print(soup.prettify()) # # # # # ## Sacré bleu! #
# # Note that the tag has been rewritten to reflect the fact that the document is now in UTF-8. If you don't want UTF-8, you can pass an encoding into ``prettify()``:: print(soup.prettify("latin-1")) # # # # ... You can also call encode() on the ``BeautifulSoup`` object, or any element in the soup, just as if it were a Python string:: soup.p.encode("latin-1") # 'Sacr\xe9 bleu!
' soup.p.encode("utf-8") # 'Sacr\xc3\xa9 bleu!
' Any characters that can't be represented in your chosen encoding will be converted into numeric XML entity references. Here's a document that includes the Unicode character SNOWMAN:: markup = u"\N{SNOWMAN}" snowman_soup = BeautifulSoup(markup) tag = snowman_soup.b The SNOWMAN character can be part of a UTF-8 document (it looks like ☃), but there's no representation for that character in ISO-Latin-1 or ASCII, so it's converted into "☃" for those encodings:: print(tag.encode("utf-8")) # ☃ print tag.encode("latin-1") # ☃ print tag.encode("ascii") # ☃ Unicode, Dammit --------------- You can use Unicode, Dammit without using Beautiful Soup. It's useful whenever you have data in an unknown encoding and you just want it to become Unicode:: from bs4 import UnicodeDammit dammit = UnicodeDammit("Sacr\xc3\xa9 bleu!") print(dammit.unicode_markup) # Sacré bleu! dammit.original_encoding # 'utf-8' Unicode, Dammit's guesses will get a lot more accurate if you install the ``chardet`` or ``cchardet`` Python libraries. The more data you give Unicode, Dammit, the more accurately it will guess. If you have your own suspicions as to what the encoding might be, you can pass them in as a list:: dammit = UnicodeDammit("Sacr\xe9 bleu!", ["latin-1", "iso-8859-1"]) print(dammit.unicode_markup) # Sacré bleu! dammit.original_encoding # 'latin-1' Unicode, Dammit has two special features that Beautiful Soup doesn't use. Smart quotes ^^^^^^^^^^^^ You can use Unicode, Dammit to convert Microsoft smart quotes to HTML or XML entities:: markup = b"I just \x93love\x94 Microsoft Word\x92s smart quotes
" UnicodeDammit(markup, ["windows-1252"], smart_quotes_to="html").unicode_markup # u'I just “love” Microsoft Word’s smart quotes
' UnicodeDammit(markup, ["windows-1252"], smart_quotes_to="xml").unicode_markup # u'I just “love” Microsoft Word’s smart quotes
' You can also convert Microsoft smart quotes to ASCII quotes:: UnicodeDammit(markup, ["windows-1252"], smart_quotes_to="ascii").unicode_markup # u'I just "love" Microsoft Word\'s smart quotes
' Hopefully you'll find this feature useful, but Beautiful Soup doesn't use it. Beautiful Soup prefers the default behavior, which is to convert Microsoft smart quotes to Unicode characters along with everything else:: UnicodeDammit(markup, ["windows-1252"]).unicode_markup # u'I just \u201clove\u201d Microsoft Word\u2019s smart quotes
' Inconsistent encodings ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Sometimes a document is mostly in UTF-8, but contains Windows-1252 characters such as (again) Microsoft smart quotes. This can happen when a website includes data from multiple sources. You can use ``UnicodeDammit.detwingle()`` to turn such a document into pure UTF-8. Here's a simple example:: snowmen = (u"\N{SNOWMAN}" * 3) quote = (u"\N{LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK}I like snowmen!\N{RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK}") doc = snowmen.encode("utf8") + quote.encode("windows_1252") This document is a mess. The snowmen are in UTF-8 and the quotes are in Windows-1252. You can display the snowmen or the quotes, but not both:: print(doc) # ☃☃☃�I like snowmen!� print(doc.decode("windows-1252")) # ☃☃☃“I like snowmen!” Decoding the document as UTF-8 raises a ``UnicodeDecodeError``, and decoding it as Windows-1252 gives you gibberish. Fortunately, ``UnicodeDammit.detwingle()`` will convert the string to pure UTF-8, allowing you to decode it to Unicode and display the snowmen and quote marks simultaneously:: new_doc = UnicodeDammit.detwingle(doc) print(new_doc.decode("utf8")) # ☃☃☃“I like snowmen!” ``UnicodeDammit.detwingle()`` only knows how to handle Windows-1252 embedded in UTF-8 (or vice versa, I suppose), but this is the most common case. Note that you must know to call ``UnicodeDammit.detwingle()`` on your data before passing it into ``BeautifulSoup`` or the ``UnicodeDammit`` constructor. Beautiful Soup assumes that a document has a single encoding, whatever it might be. If you pass it a document that contains both UTF-8 and Windows-1252, it's likely to think the whole document is Windows-1252, and the document will come out looking like ``☃☃☃“I like snowmen!”``. ``UnicodeDammit.detwingle()`` is new in Beautiful Soup 4.1.0. Line numbers ============ The ``html.parser` and ``html5lib`` parsers can keep track of where in the original document each Tag was found. You can access this information as ``Tag.sourceline`` (line number) and ``Tag.sourcepos`` (position of the start tag within a line):: markup = "Paragraph 2
" soup = BeautifulSoup(markup, 'html.parser') for tag in soup.find_all('p'): print(tag.sourceline, tag.sourcepos, tag.string) # (1, 0, u'Paragraph 1') # (2, 3, u'Paragraph 2') Note that the two parsers mean slightly different things by ``sourceline`` and ``sourcepos``. For html.parser, these numbers represent the position of the initial less-than sign. For html5lib, these numbers represent the position of the final greater-than sign:: soup = BeautifulSoup(markup, 'html5lib') for tag in soup.find_all('p'): print(tag.sourceline, tag.sourcepos, tag.string) # (2, 1, u'Paragraph 1') # (3, 7, u'Paragraph 2') You can shut off this feature by passing ``store_line_numbers=False` into the ``BeautifulSoup`` constructor:: markup = "Paragraph 2
" soup = BeautifulSoup(markup, 'html.parser', store_line_numbers=False) soup.p.sourceline # None This feature is new in 4.8.1, and the parsers based on lxml don't support it. Comparing objects for equality ============================== Beautiful Soup says that two ``NavigableString`` or ``Tag`` objects are equal when they represent the same HTML or XML markup. In this example, the two tags are treated as equal, even though they live in different parts of the object tree, because they both look like "pizza":: markup = "I want pizza and more pizza!
" soup = BeautifulSoup(markup, 'html.parser') first_b, second_b = soup.find_all('b') print first_b == second_b # True print first_b.previous_element == second_b.previous_element # False If you want to see whether two variables refer to exactly the same object, use `is`:: print first_b is second_b # False Copying Beautiful Soup objects ============================== You can use ``copy.copy()`` to create a copy of any ``Tag`` or ``NavigableString``:: import copy p_copy = copy.copy(soup.p) print p_copy #I want pizza and more pizza!
The copy is considered equal to the original, since it represents the same markup as the original, but it's not the same object:: print soup.p == p_copy # True print soup.p is p_copy # False The only real difference is that the copy is completely detached from the original Beautiful Soup object tree, just as if ``extract()`` had been called on it:: print p_copy.parent # None This is because two different ``Tag`` objects can't occupy the same space at the same time. Parsing only part of a document =============================== Let's say you want to use Beautiful Soup look at a document's tags. It's a waste of time and memory to parse the entire document and then go over it again looking for tags. It would be much faster to ignore everything that wasn't an tag in the first place. The ``SoupStrainer`` class allows you to choose which parts of an incoming document are parsed. You just create a ``SoupStrainer`` and pass it in to the ``BeautifulSoup`` constructor as the ``parse_only`` argument. (Note that *this feature won't work if you're using the html5lib parser*. If you use html5lib, the whole document will be parsed, no matter what. This is because html5lib constantly rearranges the parse tree as it works, and if some part of the document didn't actually make it into the parse tree, it'll crash. To avoid confusion, in the examples below I'll be forcing Beautiful Soup to use Python's built-in parser.) ``SoupStrainer`` ---------------- The ``SoupStrainer`` class takes the same arguments as a typical method from `Searching the tree`_: :ref:`nameThe Dormouse's story
Once upon a time there were three little sisters; and their names were Elsie, Lacie and Tillie; and they lived at the bottom of a well.
...
""" print(BeautifulSoup(html_doc, "html.parser", parse_only=only_a_tags).prettify()) # # Elsie # # # Lacie # # # Tillie # print(BeautifulSoup(html_doc, "html.parser", parse_only=only_tags_with_id_link2).prettify()) # # Lacie # print(BeautifulSoup(html_doc, "html.parser", parse_only=only_short_strings).prettify()) # Elsie # , # Lacie # and # Tillie # ... # You can also pass a ``SoupStrainer`` into any of the methods covered in `Searching the tree`_. This probably isn't terribly useful, but I thought I'd mention it:: soup = BeautifulSoup(html_doc) soup.find_all(only_short_strings) # [u'\n\n', u'\n\n', u'Elsie', u',\n', u'Lacie', u' and\n', u'Tillie', # u'\n\n', u'...', u'\n'] Troubleshooting =============== .. _diagnose: ``diagnose()`` -------------- If you're having trouble understanding what Beautiful Soup does to a document, pass the document into the ``diagnose()`` function. (New in Beautiful Soup 4.2.0.) Beautiful Soup will print out a report showing you how different parsers handle the document, and tell you if you're missing a parser that Beautiful Soup could be using:: from bs4.diagnose import diagnose with open("bad.html") as fp: data = fp.read() diagnose(data) # Diagnostic running on Beautiful Soup 4.2.0 # Python version 2.7.3 (default, Aug 1 2012, 05:16:07) # I noticed that html5lib is not installed. Installing it may help. # Found lxml version 2.3.2.0 # # Trying to parse your data with html.parser # Here's what html.parser did with the document: # ... Just looking at the output of diagnose() may show you how to solve the problem. Even if not, you can paste the output of ``diagnose()`` when asking for help. Errors when parsing a document ------------------------------ There are two different kinds of parse errors. There are crashes, where you feed a document to Beautiful Soup and it raises an exception, usually an ``HTMLParser.HTMLParseError``. And there is unexpected behavior, where a Beautiful Soup parse tree looks a lot different than the document used to create it. Almost none of these problems turn out to be problems with Beautiful Soup. This is not because Beautiful Soup is an amazingly well-written piece of software. It's because Beautiful Soup doesn't include any parsing code. Instead, it relies on external parsers. If one parser isn't working on a certain document, the best solution is to try a different parser. See `Installing a parser`_ for details and a parser comparison. The most common parse errors are ``HTMLParser.HTMLParseError: malformed start tag`` and ``HTMLParser.HTMLParseError: bad end tag``. These are both generated by Python's built-in HTML parser library, and the solution is to :ref:`install lxml or html5lib.