3. Making the soup¶

To parse a document, pass it into the BeautifulSoup constructor. You can pass in a string or an open filehandle:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

soup = BeautifulSoup(open("index.html"))

soup = BeautifulSoup("<html>data</html>")

First, the document is converted to Unicode, and HTML entities are converted to Unicode characters:

BeautifulSoup("Sacr&eacute; bleu!")
<html><head></head><body>Sacré bleu!</body></html>

Beautiful Soup then parses the document using the best available parser. It will use an HTML parser unless you specifically tell it to use an XML parser. (See Parsing XML.)