Getting Started with Beautiful Soup

Learn how to extract information from websites using Beautiful Soup and the Python urllib2 module. This practical, hands-on guide covers everything you need to know to get a head start in website scraping.

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

Approach

This book is a practical, hands-on guide that takes you through the techniques of web scraping using Beautiful Soup.

Who this book is written for

Getting Started with Beautiful Soup is great for anybody who is interested in website scraping and extracting information. However, a basic knowledge of Python, HTML tags, and CSS is required for better understanding.