Getting Started with Beautiful Soup

Build your own web scraper and learn all about web scraping with Beautiful Soup

Overview

Learn about the features of Beautiful Soup with Python
Extract information from Google's home page
Understand how to use a simple method to extract information from websites using Beautiful Soup and the Python urllib2 module
Master searching, navigation, content modification, encoding, and output methods quickly and efficiently
Try out the example code and get to grips with Beautiful Soup easily
In Detail

Beautiful Soup is a Python library designed for quick turnaround projects like screen-scraping. 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 without writing excess code for an application. It doesn't take much code to write an application using Beautiful Soup.

Getting Started with Beautiful Soup is a practical guide to Beautiful Soup using Python. The book starts by walking you through the installation of each and every feature of Beautiful Soup using simple examples which include sample Python codes as well as diagrams and screenshots wherever required for better understanding. The book discusses the problems of how exactly you can get data out of a website and provides an easy solution with the help of a real website and sample code.

Getting Started with Beautiful Soup goes over the different methods to install Beautiful Soup in both Linux and Windows systems. You will then learn about searching, navigating, content modification, encoding support, and output formatting with the help of examples and sample Python codes for each example so that you can try them out to get a better understanding. This book is a practical guide for scraping information from any website. If you want to learn how to efficiently scrape pages from websites, then this book is for you.

What you will learn from this book

Learn how to scrape HTML pages from websites
Implement a simple method to scrape any website with the help of developer tools, the Python urllib2 module, and Beautiful Soup
Learn how to search for information within an HTML/XML page
Modify the contents of an HTML tree
Understand encoding support in Beautiful Soup
Learn about the different types of output formatting

Getting Started with Beautiful Soup