Beautifulsoup
Beautiful Soup provides documentation and downloads for a Python library used to parse HTML.
About Beautifulsoup
Beautiful Soup is a Python library for parsing HTML and XML in screen-scraping projects. It provides methods for navigating, searching, and modifying a parse tree to extract data from documents.
It converts incoming documents to Unicode and outgoing documents to UTF-8, and sits on top of parsers such as lxml and html5lib. Version 4 requires Python 3.7 or greater, and the original encoding must be specified when it is not stated and cannot be detected.
Key features
- Parse HTML and XML documents for screen scraping
- Navigate, search, and modify document parse trees
- Convert incoming documents to Unicode automatically
- Convert outgoing documents to UTF-8
- Use lxml and html5lib parsing backends
- Filter elements by tag, class, URL, or text
Best for: Python programmers extracting data from poorly structured web pages.
Good for
- Works with lxml and html5lib to allow different parsing strategies
- Converts incoming documents to Unicode and outgoing documents to UTF-8
- MIT licensed with pip and Linux package installation options
Watch out for
- Requires manual specification of original encoding when detection fails
- Version 4 requires Python 3.7 or greater
- Version 3 does not support Python 3 and is discontinued
Beautifulsoup at a glance
- Category
- Development › Developer Tools
- Type
- Website
- Pricing
- Not confirmed. Check the site
- Platforms
- Web
- Open source
- Not stated
- Last checked
- Oct 5, 2026 · Online when checked
- Listed
- Oct 5, 2026
Guides for Developer Tools
Beautifulsoup alternatives
Tools and sites you could use instead, ranked by how closely they match.
Zeal is an offline documentation browser with searchable docsets and downloads for Windows and Linux.
Ruffus provides a Python library for building computation pipelines used in science and bioinformatics.
Use LLM, a command-line utility and Python library, to interact with large language models.
Build native interfaces with Slint, a declarative GUI toolkit for Rust, C++, JavaScript, and Python.
TextBlob offers Python natural language processing tools, including tagging, noun phrase extraction, and sentiment analysis.
KoNLPy provides Korean natural language processing tools for Python applications.
Popular in Developer Tools
Well-known listings from the same topic.
AppDevToolsappdevtools.comCommand Not Foundcommand-not-found.comTestFlighttestflight.apple.com/join/A8GwCnq8Sourcegraphabout.sourcegraph.comProject Wallaceprojectwallace.comCarbon Calculatorwebsitecarbon.com
Beautifulsoup FAQ
How do I install Beautiful Soup 4?
Run pip install beautifulsoup4. It is also available as python3-bs4 on Debian and Ubuntu, and as python3-beautifulsoup4 on Fedora.
Which Python versions does Beautiful Soup 4 support?
Python 3.7 and greater. Support for Python 2 ended on January 1, 2021.
What if Beautiful Soup cannot detect a document's encoding?
Specify the original encoding yourself when the document does not specify one and it cannot be detected.
Is something wrong or out of date?
Tell us and an editor will check it.
Own this website?
Claim this listing
Claim the listing and suggest updates yourself. An editor checks every claim first.