What is beautifulsoup built on?

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Julius Hamilton

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Sep 20, 2021, 8:24:32 AM9/20/21
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Hey,

I would like to write a script which extracts the text content from similarly structured webpages (the documentation pages for Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications).

I understand Beautiful Soup is a standard tool designed precisely for this, i.e. that it could select a specific HTML node to extract text from.

However I was curious, what is the most pure, ubiquitous underlying tool for this application, just for the simple action of going to an HTML node and retrieving the text there? What is Beautiful Soup built on? I thought it might be Xpath, an XML parser, but so far it seems like Xpath is used inside HTML documents rather than outside it.

Thanks very much.

leonardr

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Sep 20, 2021, 9:55:33 AM9/20/21
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Hi,

Beautiful Soup uses an external HTML parser (either html.parser, html5lib, or lxml) to parse documents into an internal DOM. For the thing you're talking about -- going to a node of the DOM after the document has been parsed -- Beautiful Soup exposes a custom Python API. Sometimes other developers copy this API for Beautiful Soup-like libraries in other languages, but it's ultimately something I made up in 2004.

There are other, language-independent ways of navigating the DOM: CSS selectors (which Beautiful Soup supports through the soupselect package) and XPath (which Beautiful Soup doesn't support but lxml does).

Leonard

Rogerio Cardin

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Oct 3, 2021, 11:00:13 AM10/3/21
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Pessoal, sou Brasileiro e gostaria de uma oportunidade para o desenvolvimento em Python usando a biblioteca BeatifulSoup, que souber que quiser me ajudar , faço trabalhos de graça em troca do conhecimento.

Obrigado

Rogerio Cardin
 

 


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