Web scraping and HTML parsing
BeautifulSoup is a Python library for parsing HTML and XML documents. It creates parse trees from web pages that can be used to extract data easily. BeautifulSoup provides methods and Pythonic idioms for navigating, searching, and modifying the parse tree. It works with popular parsers like lxml and html5lib, offering flexibility in parsing strategy. BeautifulSoup is particularly useful for web scraping - extracting data from websites for analysis, research, or automation. When combined with the requests library, it provides a powerful toolset for retrieving and processing web content. Important considerations when web scraping include: respecting robots.txt files, being gentle on servers (adding delays between requests), handling dynamic content (which may require Selenium), and being aware of legal and ethical considerations. Understanding BeautifulSoup allows you to extract valuable information from web pages efficiently.