`BeautifulSoup` is a __Python library__ that offers extensive functionality for parsing `HTML` pages. In the previous section, you worked with `HTML` as a string, which imposed significant limitations.

To install `BeautifulSoup`, execute the following command in your terminal or command prompt: 
- `pip install beautifulsoup4`.
- To get started, import __BeautifulSoup__ from __bs4__: `from bs4 import BeautifulSoup`.

# Importing the library
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
print(BeautifulSoup)

This library is designed for working with `HTML` files and does not handle links. However, you already know how to deal with that using urlopen from `urllib.requests`. To initiate parsing, you need to provide two parameters to the `BeautifulSoup` function: the first is the `HTML` file, and the second is the parser (we will use the built-in `html.parser` parser). This action will create a __BeautifulSoup object__. For example, let's open and read a web page.

# Importing libraries
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
from urllib.request import urlopen

# Reading web page
url = "https://codefinity-content-media.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/18a4e428-1a0f-44c2-a8ad-244cd9c7985e/jesus.html"
page = urlopen(url)
html = page.read().decode("utf-8")

# Reading HTML with BeautifulSoup
soup = BeautifulSoup(html, 'html.parser')
print(type(soup))
print(soup)

The first method we will explore is `.prettify()`, which presents the `HTML` file as a nested data structure.

# Importing libraries
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
from urllib.request import urlopen

# Reading web page
url = "https://codefinity-content-media.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/18a4e428-1a0f-44c2-a8ad-244cd9c7985e/jesus.html"
page = urlopen(url)
html = page.read().decode("utf-8")

# Reading HTML with BeautifulSoup
soup = BeautifulSoup(html, 'html.parser')
print(soup.prettify())

Here we will explore the structure of the HTML file,  how to load it, and work with the data in the file.

Learn how to extract the data more comfortably with the BeautifulSoup library. In this section, you will learn how to access specific elements and their children.

In this section, you will continue the journey with the Beautiful Soup. These, you will learn how to get attributes and contents of certain elements and how to search elements with certain attribute values.

Web Scraping with Python

What is Beautiful Soup?