BeautifulSoup – Web Scraping and Parsing Library

Beautiful Soup is a Python library used for parsing HTML and XML documents. It creates parse trees from page source code, making it easier to extract data from web pages.

Features

• Parses HTML/XML documents with ease.
• Supports multiple parsers (e.g., lxml, html5lib).
• Handles poorly-formed HTML gracefully.
• Allows easy data extraction via tag, class, and attributes.
• Compatible with both Python 2 and Python 3.

Pros

• Simple and intuitive syntax.
• Handles malformed HTML.
• Works well with other libraries like requests.
• Active community support.

Cons

• Slower than some alternatives (e.g., lxml).
• Limited functionality for more complex tasks (e.g., web scraping with dynamic content).
• Requires external libraries for some parsing (like lxml or html5lib).