Beautiful Souped Up – A Beautiful Soup GUI Utility to make Screen Scraping Even Easier

[Bryce Thomas]

Hi all,

About a month and a half ago I wrote a small GUI utility called
Beautiful Souped Up which could be of general interest to Beautiful
Soup users. Basically it allows you to try out Beautiful Soup style
queries on a piece of text and see where the matches are within the
text. So it works much like the "Find" feature of a text editor,
except that instead of typing in a word to find, you're typing in a
Beautiful Soup query and the matching strings get highlighted.

I've written an article over at
http://www.codeemporium.com/2009/10/10/beautiful-souped-up-a-beautiful-soup-gui-utility-to-make-screen-scraping-even-easier/
that includes further details as well as print screens, and the
utility can be downloaded from there free of charge. The utility is
open source, and I'd encourage anyone looking to contribute to head
over to http://github.com/brycethomas/BeautifulSoupedUp where the code
is being maintained. I figure it'd be great to see something like
this turned into a browser plugin, but I don't have the time or
requisite skills to do so myself at this point. Anyway, feedback is
welcome and let me know if you find it useful.

Cheers, Bryce.