Beautiful Soup is a Python library for pulling data out of HTML and XML files. It works with your favourite parser to provide idiomatic ways of navigating, searching, and modifying the parse tree. It commonly saves programmers hours or days of work.
BeautifulSoup
Beautiful Soup is a Python library designed for quick turnaround projects like screen-scraping. Three features make it powerful:
- 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. It doesn’t take much code to write an application
- Beautiful Soup automatically converts incoming documents to Unicode and outgoing documents to UTF-8. You don’t have to think about encodings, unless the document doesn’t specify an encoding and Beautiful Soup can’t autodetect one. Then you just have to specify the original encoding.
- Beautiful Soup sits on top of popular Python parsers like lxml and html5lib, allowing you to try out different parsing strategies or trade speed for flexibility.
Despite all these programming flexibilities there is hardly any document which lets us know how to install BeautifulSoup in Windows7. Here is a work around for the same.
How To Install BeautifulSoup in Windows 7
Step1: Download BeautifulSoup3.2.1 from here and BeautifulSoup4-4.0.1 from here
Step2: Extract the tar.gz files and copy the ‘BeautifulSoup.pyc’ to your python install folder in site-packages (“C:\Python27\Lib\site-packages\”).
Step3: open the IDLE Python GUI and type “import BeautifulSoup” without quotes and press enter.
Step4: You are all set to use BeautifulSoup, Congrats.
So, what do you think ?