Dear all,

Let me start by saying that Beautiful Soup 4 is a wonderful package. I have
used BS4 to implement a script that extracts the main text from a news
article and it works great, especially with Unicode. That script is now
being merged with a bunch of other scripts that use plain lxml and no BS4.

In terms of efficiency, it would be best if the html would only be parsed
once. There may be two possibilities to accomplish this. First, BS4 could
be given the tree as parsed by lxml. Second, the tree should be obtainable
once BS4 has processed and parsed the html. I think that the former is not
possible since BS4 does some Unicode magic to the html (correct me if I'm
wrong about this). So I'm now hoping that the latter is possible.

I have looked at the source code of BS4 (builder/_lxml.py) and at the lxml
documentation. The documentation mentions that after the parser has been
fed some markup, parser.close() should return the root element. However,
I'm only getting "None". Any help on this or some other way to parse the
html only once is much appreciated. Thank you.

Best wishes,

Jeroen