News You Can Bruise for 2005 March 31 (entry 2)

Thu Mar 31 2005 22:45 PST: The Beautiful Soup 2.0 beta is available for a limited time only, before it becomes the real 2.0. Before I bless it I want other people to try porting their old code to the new version, but mainly to see if the new tree builder works as well as I think it does deciding how to build a parse tree out of bad HTML. All the other stuff is new features, so if you have to change your code, it's because your old code was a victim of the weird ways version 1.x parsed bad HTML. One fun way to test it is just load an HTML file into a BeautifulSoup and prettyPrint() it to see if the tags line up the way you think they should. It all depends on your idea of what's fun, of course.

Beautiful Soup 2.0 only works with Python 2.2 and above, which is unfortunate but I had to do that so I could subclass the string and Unicode types. Should a sufficiently large mob form outside my castle, I'll consider doing a version of the the new version that works with Python 1.5.2.