What is the difference between Python ElementTree and BeautifulSoup?

When working with HTML or XML data in Python, two popular parsing modules are ElementTree and BeautifulSoup. But what's the difference between them and when should you use each?

ElementTree for XML Parsing

Python's ElementTree module provides a simple way to parse and generate XML data. Some key things to know about ElementTree:

For example:

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

tree = ET.parse('data.xml')
root = tree.getroot()

for child in root:
  print(child.tag, child.attrib)

So if you need to extract data from or modify XML, ElementTree is a great choice.

BeautifulSoup for Scraping HTML

BeautifulSoup is designed for parsing potentially malformed real-world HTML. Key features:

For example:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

soup = BeautifulSoup(html_doc, 'html.parser')

links = soup.find_all('a')
for link in links:
  print(link.get('href'))

So if you are working with HTML scraping or need to handle "wild" HTML, go with BeautifulSoup.

ElementTree provides XML oriented capabilities while BeautifulSoup is more focused on real-world HTML and scraping tasks. Consider the structure and format of your data when choosing between them.