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Beautiful Soup Documentation

website·Indexed Apr 12, 2026

https://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/bs4/doc/

Official documentation for Beautiful Soup, a Python library for parsing HTML and XML documents. The docs cover installation, quick start guides, and API references for versions 3 and 4 (including 4.14.3). Key topics include parsing with html.parser and lxml, navigating parse trees via methods like .next_sibling and .find_all, and handling Unicode, entities, and encoding. Resources include translated guides in Chinese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, and Russian, alongside download links and module references for bs4.

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What's inside Beautiful Soup

  1. Dada Pokey random comic generator

    Dada Pokey combines Dadaist principles with the Pokey comic archive to generate random comic panels. Every Pokey panel in the archives is an equally likely candidate for a given Dada Pokey panel. The list of archived panels is updated once a week. Users can submit liked Dada Pokeys to be included in the Best of collection.

  2. Unicode and HTML entity conversion

    Beautiful Soup automatically converts documents to Unicode and transforms HTML entities (like é) into their corresponding Unicode characters. This happens before parsing. The parser used is typically html.parser unless you specify an XML parser.

  3. OPDS as a universal connector for library systems

    OPDS (Open Publication Distribution System) functions as a 'magic arrow' that connects diverse components in library ecosystems. It works for human-facing client-server relationships (like the SimplyE mobile app) and machine-to-machine integrations (like connecting NYPL's collection with Internet Archive, Unglue.it, and Standard Ebooks). This interoperability allows libraries to expand their digital collections with free books from multiple sources without additional cost.

  4. OPDS as the Enterprise Media Distribution Standard

    OPDS (Open Publication Distribution System) serves as the connecting standard between Library Simplified's components. The key value is not in individual products but in the consistent labeling of connections between them—enabling interoperability. Because NYPL and Library Simplified are non-profits, they can allow organizations to use individual components or just adopt the OPDS concept, growing the OPDS ecosystem without vendor lock-in pressure.

  5. Taxonomy of instruction types for web services

    Web services can provide instructions to clients in five forms: (1) Human-readable documentation - necessary for defining machine-readable specs but proliferates unnecessarily; (2) Native-language bindings - client libraries generated by service designers, considered problematic because they compensate for earlier design failures; (3) Service descriptors - specs for generating native bindings (e.g., WSDL), also problematic; (4) Hypermedia - language-neutral descriptions of potential HTTP requests; (5) Code-on-demand - executable code served alongside data, allowing servers to extend client capabilities at runtime.

  6. Leonard Richardson's personal website (Crummy)

    Crummy is the personal website of Leonard Richardson (leonardr), active since 1996. It hosts his resume, writing, software projects, and weblog. Richardson was born in Los Angeles, raised in Arvin, California, and now lives in New York City. His wife is Sumana Harihareswara. Content is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0.

  7. Core roguelike features in robotfindskitten

    rfk implements classic roguelike characteristics: random environment generation, turn-based gameplay, grid-based movement, non-modal interface, exploration and discovery mechanics, single player character, and ASCII display. The game was directly inspired by Rogue (1980) and captures the charm of DOS-era ASCII character ambiguity where letters like 'H' become monsters (hobgoblin) and symbols like ☺ become the player (@ equivalent).

  8. Built-in parser classes overview

    Beautiful Soup 3 includes four parser classes: BeautifulSoup (default HTML parser with nesting heuristics), BeautifulStoneSoup (XML parser, no nesting rules), MinimalSoup (subclass of BeautifulSoup with HTML facts like self-closing tags but no nesting intelligence, useful for bad markup), ICantBelieveItsBeautifulSoup (subclass with stricter HTML-standard heuristics, ignores real-world usage patterns like nested <B> tags), and BeautifulSOAP (subclass of BeautifulStoneSoup that promotes subelements to parent attributes, useful for SOAP messages).

  9. Influences: Rogue, Planetfall, and Nethack

    Three key influences shaped robotfindskitten: (1) DOS Rogue's ASCII display quirks and the 'secret alphabet' within IBM PC characters, (2) Planetfall's curious robot companion who doesn't die, and (3) Nethack's rumor messages in fortune cookies, which expanded the creator's vision of what could go into a computer game. The creator played DOS Rogue as a child on an IBM PC without a graphics card, and later spent years with Nethack before writing rfk in 1997.

  10. MSM Features

    MSM provides three main capabilities: (1) Store all project metadata in a single configuration file, (2) Group projects in multiple ways for different views, and (3) Simple text replacements (cross-reference tags) to reduce maintenance effort when projects reference each other.

  11. Dada Limericks: Automated limerick generation using Queneau assembly

    This feature generates new limericks by combining lines from the Jim McWilliam collection of 95,000 limericks using Queneau assembly. New limericks are generated every five minutes. Users can follow @DadaLimericks on Twitter to receive six generated limericks daily. The feature is inspired by Dr. Andy Holding's work on The Science of Fiction.

  12. Leonard Richardson's Writing Catalog Overview

    This page catalogs Leonard Richardson's creative output including novels, technical books, weblogs, technical papers and presentations, short stories, articles, games, short-short fiction, NaNoGenMo entries, bagatelles, and works by others. Key novels are 'Situation Normal' (2020) and 'Constellation Games' (2011). Technical books include 'RESTful Web APIs' and 'RESTful Web Services' published by O'Reilly. The main weblog is 'News You Can Bruise' running since 1997.