News You Can Bruise for 2007 April 10

Sometimes people express the opinion that Beautiful Soup should be in the standard library. Given the current state of the Python standard library, and the nature of standard libraries in general, I'd rather it not. The standard library is extremely resistant to change—look at sgmllib. It's easier to start over—look at urllib2 and httplib2.

The two other reasons I've seen given for not including BS in the standard library are that it has unspecified Unicode bugs, and that the name is silly. Dude, just rename it. Also, you're using a programming language named after a sketch comedy show. As for the Unicode bug(s), I fixed the one people were complaining about, and the result is Beautiful Soup 3.0.4.

I was actually doing a very large change that no one had complained about, and it wasn't working out well. I decided to just do a release full of easy stuff, since a lot of people were having the Unicode problem.

I'm also seriously thinking about retiring Rubyful Soup, because hpricot is a lot faster.