News You Can Bruise for 2012 January 20

Thanks to some help from Ezio Melotti I've got the Beautiful Soup test suite passing on Python 2.7 and Python 3.2. Here's a tarball containing the original Python 2 module in bs4, plus the same code autoconverted to Python 3.2 in py3k/bs4.

I'm still not sure about the best way to distribute this package, either while it's beta or afterwards. I'll probably end up creating a new project on PyPi, because otherwise people who install programs that easy_install beautifulsoup will crash due to the module's new name. Does that make any sense?

Anyhow, we're almost at the end of this fitfully travelled road. Once I figure out distribution and rewrite the documentation, a) no one should need to use BS3 anymore if they don't want to, and b) it should be possible to get lxml-like performance or html5lib-like flexibility with a Beautiful Soup API, by actually using lxml or html5lib as the underlying parser.

PS: remember, it's now from bs4 import BeautifulSoup.