Web Scraping with Beautiful Soup

Beautiful Soup is the most popular Python library for web scraping. It makes parsing HTML and XML documents simple and intuitive, even when dealing with poorly formatted markup.

Why Beautiful Soup?

• Simple and Pythonic API - easy to learn and use
• Handles messy HTML - works with broken or malformed markup
• Multiple parsers - supports html.parser, lxml, html5lib
• Powerful navigation - traverse the document tree easily
• Wide community support - extensive documentation and examples

Common use cases:

• Extracting product information from e-commerce sites
• Scraping news articles and blog posts
• Collecting job listings from career sites
• Gathering research data from public websites
• Building datasets for data analysis

How Beautiful Soup works:

1. Parse HTML document into a tree structure
2. Navigate the tree using tags, attributes, and CSS selectors
3. Extract text, attributes, and nested content
4. Clean and transform the scraped data

Beautiful Soup vs other tools:

• Beautiful Soup: Best for static HTML, simple to use
• Selenium/Playwright: For JavaScript-heavy sites
• Scrapy: For large-scale production scraping