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BeautifulSoup_ is a Python package that parses broken HTML. While libxml2
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(and thus lxml) can also parse broken HTML, BeautifulSoup is a bit more
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forgiving and has superiour `support for encoding detection`_.
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BeautifulSoup_ is a Python package that parses broken HTML, just like
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lxml supports it based on the parser of libxml2. BeautifulSoup uses a
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different parsing approach. It is not a real HTML parser but uses
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regular expressions to dive through tag soup. It is therefore more
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forgiving in some cases and less good in others. It is not uncommon
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that lxml/libxml2 parses and fixes broken HTML better, but
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BeautifulSoup has superiour `support for encoding detection`_. It
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very much depends on the input which parser works better.
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.. _BeautifulSoup: http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/
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.. _`support for encoding detection`: http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/documentation.html#Beautiful%20Soup%20Gives%20You%20Unicode%2C%20Dammit
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.. _ElementSoup: http://effbot.org/zone/element-soup.htm
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lxml can benefit from the parsing capabilities of BeautifulSoup
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through the ``lxml.html.soupparser`` module. It provides three main
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functions: ``fromstring()`` and ``parse()`` to parse a string or file
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using BeautifulSoup, and ``convert_tree()`` to convert an existing
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BeautifulSoup tree into a list of top-level Elements.
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To prevent users from having to choose their parser library in
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advance, lxml can interface to the parsing capabilities of
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BeautifulSoup through the ``lxml.html.soupparser`` module. It
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provides three main functions: ``fromstring()`` and ``parse()`` to
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parse a string or file using BeautifulSoup into an ``lxml.html``
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document, and ``convert_tree()`` to convert an existing BeautifulSoup
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tree into a list of top-level Elements.
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Parsing with the soupparser
added
removed
doc/elementsoup.txt
