Beautiful Soup is a library that makes it easy to scrape information
from web pages. It sits atop an HTML or XML parser, providing Pythonic
idioms for iterating, searching, and modifying the parse tree.
# Quick start
```
>>> from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
>>> soup = BeautifulSoup("SomebadHTML")
>>> print soup.prettify()
Some
bad
HTML
>>> soup.find(text="bad")
u'bad'
>>> soup.i
HTML
>>> soup = BeautifulSoup("SomebadXML", "xml")
>>> print soup.prettify()
Some
bad
XML
```
To go beyond the basics, [comprehensive documentation is available](http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/bs4/doc/).
# Links
* [Homepage](http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/bs4/)
* [Documentation](http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/bs4/doc/)
* [Discussion group](http://groups.google.com/group/beautifulsoup/)
* [Development](https://code.launchpad.net/beautifulsoup/)
* [Bug tracker](https://bugs.launchpad.net/beautifulsoup/)
* [Complete changelog](https://bazaar.launchpad.net/~leonardr/beautifulsoup/bs4/view/head:/CHANGELOG)
# Building the documentation
The bs4/doc/ directory contains full documentation in Sphinx
format. Run `make html` in that directory to create HTML
documentation.
# Running the unit tests
Beautiful Soup supports unit test discovery from the project root directory:
```
$ nosetests
```
```
$ python -m unittest discover -s bs4 # Python 2.7 and up
```
If you checked out the source tree, you should see a script in the
home directory called test-all-versions. This script will run the unit
tests under Python 2.7, then create a temporary Python 3 conversion of
the source and run the unit tests again under Python 3.