Chapter 2. Creating a BeautifulSoup Object

We saw how to install Beautiful Soup in Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X machines in Chapter 1, Installing Beautiful Soup.

Beautiful Soup is widely used for getting data from web pages. We can use Beautiful Soup to extract any data in an HTML/XML document, for example, to get all links in a page or to get text inside tags on the page. In order to achieve this, Beautiful Soup offers us different objects, and simple searching and navigation methods.

Any input HTML/XML document is converted to different Beautiful Soup objects, and based on the different properties and methods of these objects, we can extract the required data. The list of objects in Beautiful Soup includes the following:

  • BeautifulSoup
  • Tag
  • NavigableString ...

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