BeautifulSoup is a popular Python library used for parsing HTML and extracting data from websites. However, there are several alternatives if you don't want to use BeautifulSoup.
Why Consider Alternatives?
There are a few reasons why you may want to use something other than BeautifulSoup:
Built-in XML Parsers
Python's standard library comes with XML parsing modules like
These allow you to parse HTML using built-in Python code rather than an external library. The syntax is a bit more verbose than BeautifulSoup but they get the job done.
import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
tree = ET.parse(html_file)
root = tree.getroot()
for p in root.iter('p'):
print(p.text)The built-in parsers do not handle malformed HTML as well as BeautifulSoup though.
HTML Parser
Python 3.4+ includes an
from html.parser import HTMLParser
class MyHTMLParser(HTMLParser):
def handle_starttag(self, tag, attrs):
print("Encountered a start tag:", tag)
def handle_endtag(self, tag):
print("Encountered an end tag :", tag)
parser = MyHTMLParser()
parser.feed('<html><head><title>Test</title></head></html>')While not as full-featured as BeautifulSoup,
Regular Expressions
For simple HTML, regular expressions may be all you need. Just be careful since regex can get messy with complex HTML.
In the end, BeautifulSoup is still the most popular and full-featured option. But these libraries can make capable alternatives in a pinch.