Beautiful Soup 3.2.1, and Beautiful Soup 4 beta 6

[Leonard Richardson]

Not one but two releases today. First, the first real 3.x release in
almost two years.

http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/bs3/download/3.x/BeautifulSoup-3.2.1.tar.gz

This fixes a bug that can allow cross-site scripting attacks if
Beautiful Soup is used to sanitize HTML:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/beautifulsoup/+bug/868921

On output, angle brackets and bare ampersands are now escaped to XML
entities in strings. Previously they were only escaped in attribute
values. Beautiful Soup 4 escapes XML entities by default, so the
problem does not exist there unless you deliberately cause it (e.g. by
setting formatter=None).

-----

Now, on to the BS4 beta.

http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/bs4/download/4.0/beautifulsoup4-4.0.0b6.tar.gz

It's almost done at this point. All the reported bugs are fixed except
the lack of namespace support. I'd like to add that before the
release, but I don't know how much work it'll be.

Changelog:

* Multi-valued attributes like "class" always have a list of values,
even if there's only one value in the list.

* Added a number of multi-valued attributes defined in HTML5.

* Stopped generating a space before the slash that closes an
empty-element tag. This may come back if I add a special XHTML mode
(http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#C_2), but right now it's pretty
useless.

* Passing text along with tag-specific arguments to a find* method:

find("a", text="Click here")

will find tags that contain the given text as their
.string. Previously, the tag-specific arguments were ignored and
only strings were searched.

* Fixed a bug that caused the html5lib tree builder to build a
partially disconnected tree. Generally cleaned up the html5lib tree
builder.

* If you restrict a multi-valued attribute like "class" to a string
that contains spaces, Beautiful Soup will only consider it a match
if the values correspond to that specific string.

That last one is implemented as a big hack, but I can remove the hack
later without changing the API.

Leonard

[leonardr]

BTW, this would be a great time to try and port your BS3 scripts to
BS4, and let me know how difficult it was and what you had to change.

Leonard

[Bruce Eckel]

Beta 6 installed without problem using pip.

One issue I came across when running my new app with beta 6 is the lists returned by find_all, based on the new search behavior. Here's my code:

    for tag in soup.body.find_all(True, klass):

        if type(klass) == list:

            klass = klass[0]

        tag['class'].remove(klass)

So here, klass can be either a string (I think with only a single class id in it, right?) or a list of strings (each string with an individual class id).

find_all will find all tags with any of those class ids in them. remove(), however, requires that klass be a single item, not a list. In my case klass could only be a list of one, so I pulled off the only element.

This is not a bug report, just an observation.

-- Bruce Eckel
www.Reinventing-Business.com
www.MindviewInc.com

Leonard

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