TITLE Beautiful Soup: We called him Tortoise because he taught us.
META Description Beautiful Soup: a library designed for screen-scraping HTML and XML.

<img align="right" src="10.1.jpg" width="250"><br />

<p>You didn't write that awful page. You're just trying to get some
data out of it. Beautiful Soup is here to help. Since 2004, it's been
saving programmers hours or days of work on quick-turnaround
screen scraping projects.</p>

<div align="center">

<a href="bs3/download/3.x/BeautifulSoup-3.2.0.tar.gz"><h1>Beautiful Soup</h1></a>

<p>"A tremendous boon." -- <a
href="http://www.awaretek.com/python/index.html">Python411
Podcast</a></p>

<p style="background-color:#ccffcc"><b>New!</b> Try out the beta release of Beautiful Soup 4. (Last updated February 8, 2012)<br />
<code>easy_install beautifulsoup4</code> or <code>pip install beautifulsoup4</code> or <a href="/software/BeautifulSoup/bs4/download/">download a tarball</a>.<br />
 <a href="bs4/doc/">Here's the BS4 documentation.</a><br />
If you want to help me finish the beta, <a href="http://www.crummy.com/2012/02/02/0">here's what I'm looking for</a>.</a>

<p>[ <a href="#Download">Download</a> | <a
href="bs3/documentation.html">Documentation</a> | <a href="https://code.launchpad.net/beautifulsoup">Source</a> | <a href="http://groups.google.com/group/beautifulsoup">Discussion group</a> ]</p>

<small>If Beautiful Soup has saved you a lot of time and money, the
best way to pay me back is to check out <a
href="http://www.candlemarkandgleam.com/store/delivery/constellation-games-serial/"><i>Constellation
Games</i>, my sci-fi novel about alien video games</a>.<br />You can
<a
href="http://constellation.crummy.com/Constellation%20Games%20excerpt.html">read
the first two chapters for free</a>, and the full novel starts at 5
USD. Thanks!</small> </div>

<p><i>If you have questions, send them to <a
href="http://groups.google.com/group/beautifulsoup">the discussion
group</a>.</i></p>


<p>Beautiful Soup is a Python library designed for quick turnaround
projects like screen-scraping. Three features make it powerful:

<ol>

<li>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. It doesn't take
much code to write an application

<li>Beautiful Soup automatically converts incoming documents to
Unicode and outgoing documents to UTF-8. You don't have to think
about encodings, unless the document doesn't specify an encoding and
Beautiful Soup can't autodetect one. Then you just have to specify the
original encoding.

<li>Beautiful Soup sits on top of popular Python parsers like <a
href="http://lxml.de/">lxml</a> and <a
href="http://code.google.com/p/html5lib/">html5lib</a>, allowing you
to try out different parsing strategies or trade speed for
flexibility.

</ol>

<p>Beautiful Soup parses anything you give it, and does the tree
traversal stuff for you. You can tell it "Find all the links", or
"Find all the links of class <tt>externalLink</tt>", or "Find all the
links whose urls match "foo.com", or "Find the table heading that's
got bold text, then give me that text."

<p>Valuable data that was once locked up in poorly-designed websites
is now within your reach. Projects that would have taken hours take
only minutes with Beautiful Soup.

<p>Interested? <a href="doc/">Read more.</a>

<a name="Download"><h2>Download Beautiful Soup</h2></a>

<p>Version <a href="download/3.x/BeautifulSoup-3.2.0.tar.gz">3.2.0</a>
is the current release (November 21, 2010), but it's about to be
replaced by <a href="bs4/download/">Beautiful Soup 4</a> (February 8,
2012).

<p>If you're using Python 3.x, you must use Beautiful Soup 4. If you
like trying new things, I recommend you give the beta a
spin. Otherwise, I recommend you use Beautiful Soup 3.2 until the beta
period ends.

<p>Beautiful Soup is licensed under the same terms as Python itself,
so you can drop the <code>bs4/</code> directory into almost any Python
application (or into your library path) and start using it
immediately. You can also install it with <code>easy_install
BeautifulSoup</code> (for Beautiful Soup 3) or <code>easy_install
beautifulsoup4</code> (for the Beautiful Soup 4 beta).

<h2>Development</h2>

<p>Development happens at <a
href="https://launchpad.net/beautifulsoup">Launchpad</a>. You can <a
href="https://code.launchpad.net/beautifulsoup/">get the source
code</a> or <a href="https://bugs.launchpad.net/beautifulsoup/">file
bugs</a>.