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Beautiful Soup is a Python library designed for quick turnaround
projects like screen-scraping. Three features make it powerful:
* 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
* 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.
* Beautiful Soup sits on top of popular Python parsers like lxml
and html5lib, allowing you to try out different parsing strategies
or trade speed for flexibility.
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 externalLink", 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."
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.
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