Beautiful Soup Documentation
============================
.. image:: 6.1.jpg
:align: right
:alt: "The Fish-Footman began by producing from under his arm a great letter, nearly as large as himself."
`Beautiful Soup `_ is a
Python library for pulling data out of HTML and XML files. It works
with your favorite parser to provide idiomatic ways of navigating,
searching, and modifying the parse tree. It commonly saves programmers
hours or days of work.
These instructions illustrate all major features of Beautiful Soup 4,
with examples. I show you what the library is good for, how it works,
how to use it, how to make it do what you want, and what to do when it
violates your expectations.
The examples in this documentation should work the same way in Python
2.7 and Python 3.2.
You might be looking for the documentation for `Beautiful Soup 3
`_.
If so, you should know that Beautiful Soup 3 is no longer being
developed, and that Beautiful Soup 4 is recommended for all new
projects. If you want to learn about the differences between Beautiful
Soup 3 and Beautiful Soup 4, see :ref:`porting_to_bs4`.
Getting help
------------
If you have questions about Beautiful Soup, or run into problems,
`send mail to the discussion group
`_. If
your problem involves parsing an HTML document, be sure to mention
:ref:`what the diagnose() function says ` about
that document.
.. toctree::
:maxdepth: 2
:caption: Autogenerated API
bs4
.. toctree::
:maxdepth: 2
:numbered:
:caption: Table of Contents
1_quick_start.rst
2_installation.rst
3_making_the_soup.rst
4_kind_of_objects.rst
5_navigating_the_tree.rst
6_searching_the_tree.rst
7_modifying_the_tree.rst
8_output.rst
9_specifying_the_parser.rst
10_encodings.rst
11_parsing_parts_of_doc.rst
12_troubleshooting.rst
13_bs3.rst