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Is BeautifulSoup free?

Mohan Ganesan
Feb 5, 2024 ยท 2 min read

Beautiful Soup is one of the most popular Python libraries used for web scraping. As a seasoned developer, you may be wondering - can I use BeautifulSoup for free or do I need to pay for it?

The good news is that Beautiful Soup is 100% free and open source. You can download and use it without any restrictions in your Python projects.

Why BeautifulSoup is So Useful for Scraping

BeautifulSoup makes it easy to navigate, search and extract data from HTML and XML documents. Its key features include:

  • Parsing messy HTML - It can handle real-world HTML that is poorly formatted, doesn't have closing tags etc. This makes scraping the web easier.
  • Finding elements easily - You can search for elements using names, attributes, text content etc. No need for complex regular expressions or manually traversing the parse tree.
    • # Get all hyperlinks 
soup.find_all('a')

# Find element with id "main"
soup.find(id="main")
  • Extracting data - Once you've found required elements, you can easily get text, attribute values etc.

    • So BeautifulSoup handles most of the annoying parts of web scraping. Allowing you to focus on the fun data extraction part!

    How to Install BeautifulSoup

    As BeautifulSoup is a Python package, you need to install it using pip which is the PyPA recommended tool for installing Python packages:

    pip install beautifulsoup4

    And you're done! No need to signup anywhere or get an API key.

    BeautifulSoup is free to use without any catches. Its simple API and ability to handle real-world HTML makes it invaluable for web scraping in Python. I highly recommend adding it to your developer toolkit!

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