Beautiful Soup In Python: Installation Guide For Beginners

Beautiful Soup in Python: The Beautiful Soup in Python is a web scraping tool used to manage the effective format of your web page including HTML, and XML documents. They also help in extracting crucial insights required for various purposes. Let us know how to install Beautiful Soup in Python.

Table of Contents

What is web scraping?

Web scraping refers to the process of extracting data from a website. It involves fetching web pages, parsing the HTML or XML content of those pages, and then extracting the desired information for further analysis or storage. Web scraping can gather various types of information from the internet, such as texts, images, links, product information, etc.

Web scraping is done for various purposes, which include:

Gathering information for research or analysis
Building datasets for machine learning and data mining
Monitoring websites for changes and updates
Extracting product information for price comparison or market analysis
Scraping news articles, social content, or other online sources for content aggregation

What is Beautiful Soup?

Beautiful Soap is a Python library. It is a compelling library used for web scraping tasks. It allows the developer to extract data from HTML and XML files easily and conveniently.

Also Read: Beautifulsoup: Beginner’s Guide to Web Scraping in Python

Features of the Python Library Beautiful Soap

Here are some of the key characteristics of the beautiful soap, which include:

Parsing HTML or XML: Beautiful Soup can parse HTML and XML documents, regardless of their complexity, and create a parse tree that users can navigate and search.
Robustness: Beautiful Soup is a Python library that is able to handle HTML that is not well-formed or has errors in its structure. It can still effectively extract data from such HTML documents despite the issues with the markup.
Easy Navigation: It allows developers to navigate the parse tree by accessing tags, attributes, and text content. One can move up and down the parse tree and search for specific elements based on various criteria.
Integration: Beautiful Soup can be seamlessly integrated with the other libraries and tools commonly used in web scraping workflows.

Beautiful Soup in Python: Installing Requests and Beautiful Soup

To install Beautiful Soup, the user can use pip, the Python package manager. Here’s how you can install Beautiful Soup and Requests:

pip install beautifulsoup4

pip install requests

pip install html5lib

The above command can be implemented in the terminal or command prompt. This will download and install the latest version of Beautiful Soup, along with any dependencies it requires.

After installation, the libraries Beautiful Soup, requests, and HTML5 can be imported into the Python scripts using:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

import Requests

from bs4 import html5lib

Now, the libraries are ready to use for web scraping and parsing HTML or XML documents.

Also Read: Armstrong Number In Python

Beautiful Soup in Python: Scraping in Python using Requests and Beautiful Soup

The developer first needs to send the HTTP request to the server of the page that is to be scrapped. The server sends an email that contains the HTML content of the web page. Since we are using Python for the requests, we need a third-party HTTP library, and we will use Requests.

Then it is required to fetch the web content. For fetching the web content, we will be using the ‘requests.get()’ method. For example

url = ‘//website’

r = requests.get (url)

print(r.content)

The output of the above code should be the entire HTML code of the webpage. The resultant code is unstructured, and a beautiful soup will help us to clean up the code and get the data that we require.

Now that we have the content of the web page, we need to parse the HTML content using Beautiful Soup. Now we need to pass the HTML content and a parser (here html5lib) to the Beautiful Soup constructor.

soup = BeautifulSoup (r.content, ‘html5lib’)

Now, we need to extract the data using the Beautiful Soup method. We will be using Beautiful Soup methods to extract the desired data from the HTML content.

Searching for specific tags can be done using methods like find() or find_all(), followed by their attributes or text content.

links = soup.find_all (‘a’)

for link in links:

print (link.get(‘….’))

That is how we will be extracting the web content

A few things must be taken care of while executing the following processes or steps, that includes,

Check the status code of the response to ensure that the page was fetched successfully by using the line
response.status_code == 200
Be careful about the website’s terms of service and robots.txt file to ensure compliance with their policies.
Test the scraper on different web pages to ensure it handles various cases easily and correctly.

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Beautiful Soup in Python FAQs

How does Beautiful Soup work in Python 3?

The request library retrieves HTML content from a website. Beautiful Soup parses HTML and transforms it into Python objects.

What is Beautiful Soup?

Beautiful Soup is a Python library that parses structured data. It enables you to interact with HTML in a manner similar to how you interact with a web page via developer tools. The library provides a few simple functions for navigating the HTML you have received.

Is Python good for web scraping?

While there are many libraries and frameworks available in various languages for extracting web data, Python has long been a popular choice due to its extensive web scraping capabilities.