Work with the Library

Regular expressions are great for matches but a bit inconvenient. Python provides us with an instrumental library for web scrapping - BeautifulSoup!

BeautifulSoup makes it easy to go through HTML files and extract the parts we are interested in. To import the library, use:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

To create the first object and start iterating with the website, use the following code:

soup = BeautifulSoup(html, "html.parser")

We assign the Beautiful Object to the variable soup with two parameters. The first one is the HTML file we want to parse. The second argument tells which parser to use. "html.parser" corresponds to Python's built-in HTML parser.

BeautifulSoup is highly comfortable to work with since you don't need to write regexes or additional conditions to extract the data from tags.

For instance, let's get the first tag of the type title from the website:

BeautifulSoup can also help to convert websites into DataFrames (using pandas), which are easier to manipulate. We will learn how to do this in the following chapters.