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= 4.6.3 (20180812) * Exactly the same as 4.6.2. Re-released to make the README file render properly on PyPI. = 4.6.2 (20180812) * Fix an exception when a custom formatter was asked to format a void element. [bug=1784408] = 4.6.1 (20180728) * Stop data loss when encountering an empty numeric entity, and possibly in other cases. Thanks to tos.kamiya for the fix. [bug=1698503] * Preserve XML namespaces introduced inside an XML document, not just the ones introduced at the top level. [bug=1718787] * Added a new formatter, "html5", which represents void elements as "<element>" rather than "<element/>". [bug=1716272] * Fixed a problem where the html.parser tree builder interpreted a string like "&foo " as the character entity "&foo;" [bug=1728706] * Correctly handle invalid HTML numeric character entities like “ which reference code points that are not Unicode code points. Note that this is only fixed when Beautiful Soup is used with the html.parser parser -- html5lib already worked and I couldn't fix it with lxml. [bug=1782933] * Improved the warning given when no parser is specified. [bug=1780571] * When markup contains duplicate elements, a select() call that includes multiple match clauses will match all relevant elements. [bug=1770596] * Fixed code that was causing deprecation warnings in recent Python 3 versions. Includes a patch from Ville Skyttä. [bug=1778909] [bug=1689496] * Fixed a Windows crash in diagnose() when checking whether a long markup string is a filename. [bug=1737121] * Stopped HTMLParser from raising an exception in very rare cases of bad markup. [bug=1708831] * Fixed a bug where find_all() was not working when asked to find a tag with a namespaced name in an XML document that was parsed as HTML. [bug=1723783] * You can get finer control over formatting by subclassing bs4.element.Formatter and passing a Formatter instance into (e.g.) encode(). [bug=1716272] * You can pass a dictionary of `attrs` into BeautifulSoup.new_tag. This makes it possible to create a tag with an attribute like 'name' that would otherwise be masked by another argument of new_tag. [bug=1779276] * Clarified the deprecation warning when accessing tag.fooTag, to cover the possibility that you might really have been looking for a tag called 'fooTag'. = 4.6.0 (20170507) = * Added the `Tag.get_attribute_list` method, which acts like `Tag.get` for getting the value of an attribute, but which always returns a list, whether or not the attribute is a multi-value attribute. [bug=1678589] * It's now possible to use a tag's namespace prefix when searching, e.g. soup.find('namespace:tag') [bug=1655332] * Improved the handling of empty-element tags like <br> when using the html.parser parser. [bug=1676935] * HTML parsers treat all HTML4 and HTML5 empty element tags (aka void element tags) correctly. [bug=1656909] * Namespace prefix is preserved when an XML tag is copied. Thanks to Vikas for a patch and test. [bug=1685172] = 4.5.3 (20170102) = * Fixed foster parenting when html5lib is the tree builder. Thanks to Geoffrey Sneddon for a patch and test. * Fixed yet another problem that caused the html5lib tree builder to create a disconnected parse tree. [bug=1629825] = 4.5.2 (20170102) = * Apart from the version number, this release is identical to 4.5.3. Due to user error, it could not be completely uploaded to PyPI. Use 4.5.3 instead. = 4.5.1 (20160802) = * Fixed a crash when passing Unicode markup that contained a processing instruction into the lxml HTML parser on Python 3. [bug=1608048] = 4.5.0 (20160719) = * Beautiful Soup is no longer compatible with Python 2.6. This actually happened a few releases ago, but it's now official. * Beautiful Soup will now work with versions of html5lib greater than 0.99999999. [bug=1603299] * If a search against each individual value of a multi-valued attribute fails, the search will be run one final time against the complete attribute value considered as a single string. That is, if a tag has class="foo bar" and neither "foo" nor "bar" matches, but "foo bar" does, the tag is now considered a match. This happened in previous versions, but only when the value being searched for was a string. Now it also works when that value is a regular expression, a list of strings, etc. [bug=1476868] * Fixed a bug that deranged the tree when a whitespace element was reparented into a tag that contained an identical whitespace element. [bug=1505351] * Added support for CSS selector values that contain quoted spaces, such as tag[style="display: foo"]. [bug=1540588] * Corrected handling of XML processing instructions. [bug=1504393] * Corrected an encoding error that happened when a BeautifulSoup object was copied. [bug=1554439] * The contents of <textarea> tags will no longer be modified when the tree is prettified. [bug=1555829] * When a BeautifulSoup object is pickled but its tree builder cannot be pickled, its .builder attribute is set to None instead of being destroyed. This avoids a performance problem once the object is unpickled. [bug=1523629] * Specify the file and line number when warning about a BeautifulSoup object being instantiated without a parser being specified. [bug=1574647] * The `limit` argument to `select()` now works correctly, though it's not implemented very efficiently. [bug=1520530] * Fixed a Python 3 ByteWarning when a URL was passed in as though it were markup. Thanks to James Salter for a patch and test. [bug=1533762] * We don't run the check for a filename passed in as markup if the 'filename' contains a less-than character; the less-than character indicates it's most likely a very small document. [bug=1577864] = 4.4.1 (20150928) = * Fixed a bug that deranged the tree when part of it was removed. Thanks to Eric Weiser for the patch and John Wiseman for a test. [bug=1481520] * Fixed a parse bug with the html5lib tree-builder. Thanks to Roel Kramer for the patch. [bug=1483781] * Improved the implementation of CSS selector grouping. Thanks to Orangain for the patch. [bug=1484543] * Fixed the test_detect_utf8 test so that it works when chardet is installed. [bug=1471359] * Corrected the output of Declaration objects. [bug=1477847] = 4.4.0 (20150703) = Especially important changes: * Added a warning when you instantiate a BeautifulSoup object without explicitly naming a parser. [bug=1398866] * __repr__ now returns an ASCII bytestring in Python 2, and a Unicode string in Python 3, instead of a UTF8-encoded bytestring in both versions. In Python 3, __str__ now returns a Unicode string instead of a bytestring. [bug=1420131] * The `text` argument to the find_* methods is now called `string`, which is more accurate. `text` still works, but `string` is the argument described in the documentation. `text` may eventually change its meaning, but not for a very long time. [bug=1366856] * Changed the way soup objects work under copy.copy(). Copying a NavigableString or a Tag will give you a new NavigableString that's equal to the old one but not connected to the parse tree. Patch by Martijn Peters. [bug=1307490] * Started using a standard MIT license. [bug=1294662] * Added a Chinese translation of the documentation by Delong .w. New features: * Introduced the select_one() method, which uses a CSS selector but only returns the first match, instead of a list of matches. [bug=1349367] * You can now create a Tag object without specifying a TreeBuilder. Patch by Martijn Pieters. [bug=1307471] * You can now create a NavigableString or a subclass just by invoking the constructor. [bug=1294315] * Added an `exclude_encodings` argument to UnicodeDammit and to the Beautiful Soup constructor, which lets you prohibit the detection of an encoding that you know is wrong. [bug=1469408] * The select() method now supports selector grouping. Patch by Francisco Canas [bug=1191917] Bug fixes: * Fixed yet another problem that caused the html5lib tree builder to create a disconnected parse tree. [bug=1237763] * Force object_was_parsed() to keep the tree intact even when an element from later in the document is moved into place. [bug=1430633] * Fixed yet another bug that caused a disconnected tree when html5lib copied an element from one part of the tree to another. [bug=1270611] * Fixed a bug where Element.extract() could create an infinite loop in the remaining tree. * The select() method can now find tags whose names contain dashes. Patch by Francisco Canas. [bug=1276211] * The select() method can now find tags with attributes whose names contain dashes. Patch by Marek Kapolka. [bug=1304007] * Improved the lxml tree builder's handling of processing instructions. [bug=1294645] * Restored the helpful syntax error that happens when you try to import the Python 2 edition of Beautiful Soup under Python 3. [bug=1213387] * In Python 3.4 and above, set the new convert_charrefs argument to the html.parser constructor to avoid a warning and future failures. Patch by Stefano Revera. [bug=1375721] * The warning when you pass in a filename or URL as markup will now be displayed correctly even if the filename or URL is a Unicode string. [bug=1268888] * If the initial <html> tag contains a CDATA list attribute such as 'class', the html5lib tree builder will now turn its value into a list, as it would with any other tag. [bug=1296481] * Fixed an import error in Python 3.5 caused by the removal of the HTMLParseError class. [bug=1420063] * Improved docstring for encode_contents() and decode_contents(). [bug=1441543] * Fixed a crash in Unicode, Dammit's encoding detector when the name of the encoding itself contained invalid bytes. [bug=1360913] * Improved the exception raised when you call .unwrap() or .replace_with() on an element that's not attached to a tree. * Raise a NotImplementedError whenever an unsupported CSS pseudoclass is used in select(). Previously some cases did not result in a NotImplementedError. * It's now possible to pickle a BeautifulSoup object no matter which tree builder was used to create it. However, the only tree builder that survives the pickling process is the HTMLParserTreeBuilder ('html.parser'). If you unpickle a BeautifulSoup object created with some other tree builder, soup.builder will be None. [bug=1231545] = 4.3.2 (20131002) = * Fixed a bug in which short Unicode input was improperly encoded to ASCII when checking whether or not it was the name of a file on disk. [bug=1227016] * Fixed a crash when a short input contains data not valid in filenames. [bug=1232604] * Fixed a bug that caused Unicode data put into UnicodeDammit to return None instead of the original data. [bug=1214983] * Combined two tests to stop a spurious test failure when tests are run by nosetests. [bug=1212445] = 4.3.1 (20130815) = * Fixed yet another problem with the html5lib tree builder, caused by html5lib's tendency to rearrange the tree during parsing. [bug=1189267] * Fixed a bug that caused the optimized version of find_all() to return nothing. [bug=1212655] = 4.3.0 (20130812) = * Instead of converting incoming data to Unicode and feeding it to the lxml tree builder in chunks, Beautiful Soup now makes successive guesses at the encoding of the incoming data, and tells lxml to parse the data as that encoding. Giving lxml more control over the parsing process improves performance and avoids a number of bugs and issues with the lxml parser which had previously required elaborate workarounds: - An issue in which lxml refuses to parse Unicode strings on some systems. [bug=1180527] - A returning bug that truncated documents longer than a (very small) size. [bug=963880] - A returning bug in which extra spaces were added to a document if the document defined a charset other than UTF-8. [bug=972466] This required a major overhaul of the tree builder architecture. If you wrote your own tree builder and didn't tell me, you'll need to modify your prepare_markup() method. * The UnicodeDammit code that makes guesses at encodings has been split into its own class, EncodingDetector. A lot of apparently redundant code has been removed from Unicode, Dammit, and some undocumented features have also been removed. * Beautiful Soup will issue a warning if instead of markup you pass it a URL or the name of a file on disk (a common beginner's mistake). * A number of optimizations improve the performance of the lxml tree builder by about 33%, the html.parser tree builder by about 20%, and the html5lib tree builder by about 15%. * All find_all calls should now return a ResultSet object. Patch by Aaron DeVore. [bug=1194034] = 4.2.1 (20130531) = * The default XML formatter will now replace ampersands even if they appear to be part of entities. That is, "<" will become "&lt;". The old code was left over from Beautiful Soup 3, which didn't always turn entities into Unicode characters. If you really want the old behavior (maybe because you add new strings to the tree, those strings include entities, and you want the formatter to leave them alone on output), it can be found in EntitySubstitution.substitute_xml_containing_entities(). [bug=1182183] * Gave new_string() the ability to create subclasses of NavigableString. [bug=1181986] * Fixed another bug by which the html5lib tree builder could create a disconnected tree. [bug=1182089] * The .previous_element of a BeautifulSoup object is now always None, not the last element to be parsed. [bug=1182089] * Fixed test failures when lxml is not installed. [bug=1181589] * html5lib now supports Python 3. Fixed some Python 2-specific code in the html5lib test suite. [bug=1181624] * The html.parser treebuilder can now handle numeric attributes in text when the hexidecimal name of the attribute starts with a capital X. Patch by Tim Shirley. [bug=1186242] = 4.2.0 (20130514) = * The Tag.select() method now supports a much wider variety of CSS selectors. - Added support for the adjacent sibling combinator (+) and the general sibling combinator (~). Tests by "liquider". [bug=1082144] - The combinators (>, +, and ~) can now combine with any supported selector, not just one that selects based on tag name. - Added limited support for the "nth-of-type" pseudo-class. Code by Sven Slootweg. [bug=1109952] * The BeautifulSoup class is now aliased to "_s" and "_soup", making it quicker to type the import statement in an interactive session: from bs4 import _s or from bs4 import _soup The alias may change in the future, so don't use this in code you're going to run more than once. * Added the 'diagnose' submodule, which includes several useful functions for reporting problems and doing tech support. - diagnose(data) tries the given markup on every installed parser, reporting exceptions and displaying successes. If a parser is not installed, diagnose() mentions this fact. - lxml_trace(data, html=True) runs the given markup through lxml's XML parser or HTML parser, and prints out the parser events as they happen. This helps you quickly determine whether a given problem occurs in lxml code or Beautiful Soup code. - htmlparser_trace(data) is the same thing, but for Python's built-in HTMLParser class. * In an HTML document, the contents of a <script> or <style> tag will no longer undergo entity substitution by default. XML documents work the same way they did before. [bug=1085953] * Methods like get_text() and properties like .strings now only give you strings that are visible in the document--no comments or processing commands. [bug=1050164] * The prettify() method now leaves the contents of <pre> tags alone. [bug=1095654] * Fix a bug in the html5lib treebuilder which sometimes created disconnected trees. [bug=1039527] * Fix a bug in the lxml treebuilder which crashed when a tag included an attribute from the predefined "xml:" namespace. [bug=1065617] * Fix a bug by which keyword arguments to find_parent() were not being passed on. [bug=1126734] * Stop a crash when unwisely messing with a tag that's been decomposed. [bug=1097699] * Now that lxml's segfault on invalid doctype has been fixed, fixed a corresponding problem on the Beautiful Soup end that was previously invisible. [bug=984936] * Fixed an exception when an overspecified CSS selector didn't match anything. Code by Stefaan Lippens. [bug=1168167] = 4.1.3 (20120820) = * Skipped a test under Python 2.6 and Python 3.1 to avoid a spurious test failure caused by the lousy HTMLParser in those versions. [bug=1038503] * Raise a more specific error (FeatureNotFound) when a requested parser or parser feature is not installed. Raise NotImplementedError instead of ValueError when the user calls insert_before() or insert_after() on the BeautifulSoup object itself. Patch by Aaron Devore. [bug=1038301] = 4.1.2 (20120817) = * As per PEP-8, allow searching by CSS class using the 'class_' keyword argument. [bug=1037624] * Display namespace prefixes for namespaced attribute names, instead of the fully-qualified names given by the lxml parser. [bug=1037597] * Fixed a crash on encoding when an attribute name contained non-ASCII characters. * When sniffing encodings, if the cchardet library is installed, Beautiful Soup uses it instead of chardet. cchardet is much faster. [bug=1020748] * Use logging.warning() instead of warning.warn() to notify the user that characters were replaced with REPLACEMENT CHARACTER. [bug=1013862] = 4.1.1 (20120703) = * Fixed an html5lib tree builder crash which happened when html5lib moved a tag with a multivalued attribute from one part of the tree to another. [bug=1019603] * Correctly display closing tags with an XML namespace declared. Patch by Andreas Kostyrka. [bug=1019635] * Fixed a typo that made parsing significantly slower than it should have been, and also waited too long to close tags with XML namespaces. [bug=1020268] * get_text() now returns an empty Unicode string if there is no text, rather than an empty bytestring. [bug=1020387] = 4.1.0 (20120529) = * Added experimental support for fixing Windows-1252 characters embedded in UTF-8 documents. (UnicodeDammit.detwingle()) * Fixed the handling of " with the built-in parser. [bug=993871] * Comments, processing instructions, document type declarations, and markup declarations are now treated as preformatted strings, the way CData blocks are. [bug=1001025] * Fixed a bug with the lxml treebuilder that prevented the user from adding attributes to a tag that didn't originally have attributes. [bug=1002378] Thanks to Oliver Beattie for the patch. * Fixed some edge-case bugs having to do with inserting an element into a tag it's already inside, and replacing one of a tag's children with another. [bug=997529] * Added the ability to search for attribute values specified in UTF-8. [bug=1003974] This caused a major refactoring of the search code. All the tests pass, but it's possible that some searches will behave differently. = 4.0.5 (20120427) = * Added a new method, wrap(), which wraps an element in a tag. * Renamed replace_with_children() to unwrap(), which is easier to understand and also the jQuery name of the function. * Made encoding substitution in <meta> tags completely transparent (no more %SOUP-ENCODING%). * Fixed a bug in decoding data that contained a byte-order mark, such as data encoded in UTF-16LE. [bug=988980] * Fixed a bug that made the HTMLParser treebuilder generate XML definitions ending with two question marks instead of one. [bug=984258] * Upon document generation, CData objects are no longer run through the formatter. [bug=988905] * The test suite now passes when lxml is not installed, whether or not html5lib is installed. [bug=987004] * Print a warning on HTMLParseErrors to let people know they should install a better parser library. = 4.0.4 (20120416) = * Fixed a bug that sometimes created disconnected trees. * Fixed a bug with the string setter that moved a string around the tree instead of copying it. [bug=983050] * Attribute values are now run through the provided output formatter. Previously they were always run through the 'minimal' formatter. In the future I may make it possible to specify different formatters for attribute values and strings, but for now, consistent behavior is better than inconsistent behavior. [bug=980237] * Added the missing renderContents method from Beautiful Soup 3. Also added an encode_contents() method to go along with decode_contents(). * Give a more useful error when the user tries to run the Python 2 version of BS under Python 3. * UnicodeDammit can now convert Microsoft smart quotes to ASCII with UnicodeDammit(markup, smart_quotes_to="ascii"). = 4.0.3 (20120403) = * Fixed a typo that caused some versions of Python 3 to convert the Beautiful Soup codebase incorrectly. * Got rid of the 4.0.2 workaround for HTML documents--it was unnecessary and the workaround was triggering a (possibly different, but related) bug in lxml. [bug=972466] = 4.0.2 (20120326) = * Worked around a possible bug in lxml that prevents non-tiny XML documents from being parsed. [bug=963880, bug=963936] * Fixed a bug where specifying `text` while also searching for a tag only worked if `text` wanted an exact string match. [bug=955942] = 4.0.1 (20120314) = * This is the first official release of Beautiful Soup 4. There is no 4.0.0 release, to eliminate any possibility that packaging software might treat "4.0.0" as being an earlier version than "4.0.0b10". * Brought BS up to date with the latest release of soupselect, adding CSS selector support for direct descendant matches and multiple CSS class matches. = 4.0.0b10 (20120302) = * Added support for simple CSS selectors, taken from the soupselect project. * Fixed a crash when using html5lib. [bug=943246] * In HTML5-style <meta charset="foo"> tags, the value of the "charset" attribute is now replaced with the appropriate encoding on output. [bug=942714] * Fixed a bug that caused calling a tag to sometimes call find_all() with the wrong arguments. [bug=944426] * For backwards compatibility, brought back the BeautifulStoneSoup class as a deprecated wrapper around BeautifulSoup. = 4.0.0b9 (20120228) = * Fixed the string representation of DOCTYPEs that have both a public ID and a system ID. * Fixed the generated XML declaration. * Renamed Tag.nsprefix to Tag.prefix, for consistency with NamespacedAttribute. * Fixed a test failure that occurred on Python 3.x when chardet was installed. * Made prettify() return Unicode by default, so it will look nice on Python 3 when passed into print(). = 4.0.0b8 (20120224) = * All tree builders now preserve namespace information in the documents they parse. If you use the html5lib parser or lxml's XML parser, you can access the namespace URL for a tag as tag.namespace. However, there is no special support for namespace-oriented searching or tree manipulation. When you search the tree, you need to use namespace prefixes exactly as they're used in the original document. * The string representation of a DOCTYPE always ends in a newline. * Issue a warning if the user tries to use a SoupStrainer in conjunction with the html5lib tree builder, which doesn't support them. = 4.0.0b7 (20120223) = * Upon decoding to string, any characters that can't be represented in your chosen encoding will be converted into numeric XML entity references. * Issue a warning if characters were replaced with REPLACEMENT CHARACTER during Unicode conversion. * Restored compatibility with Python 2.6. * The install process no longer installs docs or auxiliary text files. * It's now possible to deepcopy a BeautifulSoup object created with Python's built-in HTML parser. * About 100 unit tests that "test" the behavior of various parsers on invalid markup have been removed. Legitimate changes to those parsers caused these tests to fail, indicating that perhaps Beautiful Soup should not test the behavior of foreign libraries. The problematic unit tests have been reformulated as informational comparisons generated by the script scripts/demonstrate_parser_differences.py. This makes Beautiful Soup compatible with html5lib version 0.95 and future versions of HTMLParser. = 4.0.0b6 (20120216) = * Multi-valued attributes like "class" always have a list of values, even if there's only one value in the list. * Added a number of multi-valued attributes defined in HTML5. * Stopped generating a space before the slash that closes an empty-element tag. This may come back if I add a special XHTML mode (http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#C_2), but right now it's pretty useless. * Passing text along with tag-specific arguments to a find* method: find("a", text="Click here") will find tags that contain the given text as their .string. Previously, the tag-specific arguments were ignored and only strings were searched. * Fixed a bug that caused the html5lib tree builder to build a partially disconnected tree. Generally cleaned up the html5lib tree builder. * If you restrict a multi-valued attribute like "class" to a string that contains spaces, Beautiful Soup will only consider it a match if the values correspond to that specific string. = 4.0.0b5 (20120209) = * Rationalized Beautiful Soup's treatment of CSS class. A tag belonging to multiple CSS classes is treated as having a list of values for the 'class' attribute. Searching for a CSS class will match *any* of the CSS classes. This actually affects all attributes that the HTML standard defines as taking multiple values (class, rel, rev, archive, accept-charset, and headers), but 'class' is by far the most common. [bug=41034] * If you pass anything other than a dictionary as the second argument to one of the find* methods, it'll assume you want to use that object to search against a tag's CSS classes. Previously this only worked if you passed in a string. * Fixed a bug that caused a crash when you passed a dictionary as an attribute value (possibly because you mistyped "attrs"). [bug=842419] * Unicode, Dammit now detects the encoding in HTML 5-style <meta> tags like <meta charset="utf-8" />. [bug=837268] * If Unicode, Dammit can't figure out a consistent encoding for a page, it will try each of its guesses again, with errors="replace" instead of errors="strict". This may mean that some data gets replaced with REPLACEMENT CHARACTER, but at least most of it will get turned into Unicode. [bug=754903] * Patched over a bug in html5lib (?) that was crashing Beautiful Soup on certain kinds of markup. [bug=838800] * Fixed a bug that wrecked the tree if you replaced an element with an empty string. [bug=728697] * Improved Unicode, Dammit's behavior when you give it Unicode to begin with. = 4.0.0b4 (20120208) = * Added BeautifulSoup.new_string() to go along with BeautifulSoup.new_tag() * BeautifulSoup.new_tag() will follow the rules of whatever tree-builder was used to create the original BeautifulSoup object. A new <p> tag will look like "<p />" if the soup object was created to parse XML, but it will look like "<p></p>" if the soup object was created to parse HTML. * We pass in strict=False to html.parser on Python 3, greatly improving html.parser's ability to handle bad HTML. * We also monkeypatch a serious bug in html.parser that made strict=False disastrous on Python 3.2.2. * Replaced the "substitute_html_entities" argument with the more general "formatter" argument. * Bare ampersands and angle brackets are always converted to XML entities unless the user prevents it. * Added PageElement.insert_before() and PageElement.insert_after(), which let you put an element into the parse tree with respect to some other element. * Raise an exception when the user tries to do something nonsensical like insert a tag into itself. = 4.0.0b3 (20120203) = Beautiful Soup 4 is a nearly-complete rewrite that removes Beautiful Soup's custom HTML parser in favor of a system that lets you write a little glue code and plug in any HTML or XML parser you want. Beautiful Soup 4.0 comes with glue code for four parsers: * Python's standard HTMLParser (html.parser in Python 3) * lxml's HTML and XML parsers * html5lib's HTML parser HTMLParser is the default, but I recommend you install lxml if you can. For complete documentation, see the Sphinx documentation in bs4/doc/source/. What follows is a summary of the changes from Beautiful Soup 3. === The module name has changed === Previously you imported the BeautifulSoup class from a module also called BeautifulSoup. To save keystrokes and make it clear which version of the API is in use, the module is now called 'bs4': >>> from bs4 import BeautifulSoup === It works with Python 3 === Beautiful Soup 3.1.0 worked with Python 3, but the parser it used was so bad that it barely worked at all. Beautiful Soup 4 works with Python 3, and since its parser is pluggable, you don't sacrifice quality. Special thanks to Thomas Kluyver and Ezio Melotti for getting Python 3 support to the finish line. Ezio Melotti is also to thank for greatly improving the HTML parser that comes with Python 3.2. === CDATA sections are normal text, if they're understood at all. === Currently, the lxml and html5lib HTML parsers ignore CDATA sections in markup: <p><![CDATA[foo]]></p> => <p></p> A future version of html5lib will turn CDATA sections into text nodes, but only within tags like <svg> and <math>: <svg><![CDATA[foo]]></svg> => <p>foo</p> The default XML parser (which uses lxml behind the scenes) turns CDATA sections into ordinary text elements: <p><![CDATA[foo]]></p> => <p>foo</p> In theory it's possible to preserve the CDATA sections when using the XML parser, but I don't see how to get it to work in practice. === Miscellaneous other stuff === If the BeautifulSoup instance has .is_xml set to True, an appropriate XML declaration will be emitted when the tree is transformed into a string: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"> <markup> ... </markup> The ['lxml', 'xml'] tree builder sets .is_xml to True; the other tree builders set it to False. If you want to parse XHTML with an HTML parser, you can set it manually. = 3.2.0 = The 3.1 series wasn't very useful, so I renamed the 3.0 series to 3.2 to make it obvious which one you should use. = 3.1.0 = A hybrid version that supports 2.4 and can be automatically converted to run under Python 3.0. There are three backwards-incompatible changes you should be aware of, but no new features or deliberate behavior changes. 1. str() may no longer do what you want. This is because the meaning of str() inverts between Python 2 and 3; in Python 2 it gives you a byte string, in Python 3 it gives you a Unicode string. The effect of this is that you can't pass an encoding to .__str__ anymore. Use encode() to get a string and decode() to get Unicode, and you'll be ready (well, readier) for Python 3. 2. Beautiful Soup is now based on HTMLParser rather than SGMLParser, which is gone in Python 3. There's some bad HTML that SGMLParser handled but HTMLParser doesn't, usually to do with attribute values that aren't closed or have brackets inside them: <a href="foo</a>, </a><a href="bar">baz</a> <a b="<a>">', '<a b="<a>"></a><a>"></a> A later version of Beautiful Soup will allow you to plug in different parsers to make tradeoffs between speed and the ability to handle bad HTML. 3. In Python 3 (but not Python 2), HTMLParser converts entities within attributes to the corresponding Unicode characters. In Python 2 it's possible to parse this string and leave the é intact. <a href="http://crummy.com?sacré&bleu"> In Python 3, the é is always converted to \xe9 during parsing. = 3.0.7a = Added an import that makes BS work in Python 2.3. = 3.0.7 = Fixed a UnicodeDecodeError when unpickling documents that contain non-ASCII characters. Fixed a TypeError that occurred in some circumstances when a tag contained no text. Jump through hoops to avoid the use of chardet, which can be extremely slow in some circumstances. UTF-8 documents should never trigger the use of chardet. Whitespace is preserved inside <pre> and <textarea> tags that contain nothing but whitespace. Beautiful Soup can now parse a doctype that's scoped to an XML namespace. = 3.0.6 = Got rid of a very old debug line that prevented chardet from working. Added a Tag.decompose() method that completely disconnects a tree or a subset of a tree, breaking it up into bite-sized pieces that are easy for the garbage collecter to collect. Tag.extract() now returns the tag that was extracted. Tag.findNext() now does something with the keyword arguments you pass it instead of dropping them on the floor. Fixed a Unicode conversion bug. Fixed a bug that garbled some <meta> tags when rewriting them. = 3.0.5 = Soup objects can now be pickled, and copied with copy.deepcopy. Tag.append now works properly on existing BS objects. (It wasn't originally intended for outside use, but it can be now.) (Giles Radford) Passing in a nonexistent encoding will no longer crash the parser on Python 2.4 (John Nagle). Fixed an underlying bug in SGMLParser that thinks ASCII has 255 characters instead of 127 (John Nagle). Entities are converted more consistently to Unicode characters. Entity references in attribute values are now converted to Unicode characters when appropriate. Numeric entities are always converted, because SGMLParser always converts them outside of attribute values. ALL_ENTITIES happens to just be the XHTML entities, so I renamed it to XHTML_ENTITIES. The regular expression for bare ampersands was too loose. In some cases ampersands were not being escaped. (Sam Ruby?) Non-breaking spaces and other special Unicode space characters are no longer folded to ASCII spaces. (Robert Leftwich) Information inside a TEXTAREA tag is now parsed literally, not as HTML tags. TEXTAREA now works exactly the same way as SCRIPT. (Zephyr Fang) = 3.0.4 = Fixed a bug that crashed Unicode conversion in some cases. Fixed a bug that prevented UnicodeDammit from being used as a general-purpose data scrubber. Fixed some unit test failures when running against Python 2.5. When considering whether to convert smart quotes, UnicodeDammit now looks at the original encoding in a case-insensitive way. = 3.0.3 (20060606) = Beautiful Soup is now usable as a way to clean up invalid XML/HTML (be sure to pass in an appropriate value for convertEntities, or XML/HTML entities might stick around that aren't valid in HTML/XML). The result may not validate, but it should be good enough to not choke a real-world XML parser. Specifically, the output of a properly constructed soup object should always be valid as part of an XML document, but parts may be missing if they were missing in the original. As always, if the input is valid XML, the output will also be valid. = 3.0.2 (20060602) = Previously, Beautiful Soup correctly handled attribute values that contained embedded quotes (sometimes by escaping), but not other kinds of XML character. Now, it correctly handles or escapes all special XML characters in attribute values. I aliased methods to the 2.x names (fetch, find, findText, etc.) for backwards compatibility purposes. Those names are deprecated and if I ever do a 4.0 I will remove them. I will, I tell you! Fixed a bug where the findAll method wasn't passing along any keyword arguments. When run from the command line, Beautiful Soup now acts as an HTML pretty-printer, not an XML pretty-printer. = 3.0.1 (20060530) = Reintroduced the "fetch by CSS class" shortcut. I thought keyword arguments would replace it, but they don't. You can't call soup('a', class='foo') because class is a Python keyword. If Beautiful Soup encounters a meta tag that declares the encoding, but a SoupStrainer tells it not to parse that tag, Beautiful Soup will no longer try to rewrite the meta tag to mention the new encoding. Basically, this makes SoupStrainers work in real-world applications instead of crashing the parser. = 3.0.0 "Who would not give all else for two p" (20060528) = This release is not backward-compatible with previous releases. If you've got code written with a previous version of the library, go ahead and keep using it, unless one of the features mentioned here really makes your life easier. Since the library is self-contained, you can include an old copy of the library in your old applications, and use the new version for everything else. The documentation has been rewritten and greatly expanded with many more examples. Beautiful Soup autodetects the encoding of a document (or uses the one you specify), and converts it from its native encoding to Unicode. Internally, it only deals with Unicode strings. When you print out the document, it converts to UTF-8 (or another encoding you specify). [Doc reference] It's now easy to make large-scale changes to the parse tree without screwing up the navigation members. The methods are extract, replaceWith, and insert. [Doc reference. See also Improving Memory Usage with extract] Passing True in as an attribute value gives you tags that have any value for that attribute. You don't have to create a regular expression. Passing None for an attribute value gives you tags that don't have that attribute at all. Tag objects now know whether or not they're self-closing. This avoids the problem where Beautiful Soup thought that tags like <BR /> were self-closing even in XML documents. You can customize the self-closing tags for a parser object by passing them in as a list of selfClosingTags: you don't have to subclass anymore. There's a new built-in parser, MinimalSoup, which has most of BeautifulSoup's HTML-specific rules, but no tag nesting rules. [Doc reference] You can use a SoupStrainer to tell Beautiful Soup to parse only part of a document. This saves time and memory, often making Beautiful Soup about as fast as a custom-built SGMLParser subclass. [Doc reference, SoupStrainer reference] You can (usually) use keyword arguments instead of passing a dictionary of attributes to a search method. That is, you can replace soup(args={"id" : "5"}) with soup(id="5"). You can still use args if (for instance) you need to find an attribute whose name clashes with the name of an argument to findAll. [Doc reference: **kwargs attrs] The method names have changed to the better method names used in Rubyful Soup. Instead of find methods and fetch methods, there are only find methods. Instead of a scheme where you can't remember which method finds one element and which one finds them all, we have find and findAll. In general, if the method name mentions All or a plural noun (eg. findNextSiblings), then it finds many elements method. Otherwise, it only finds one element. [Doc reference] Some of the argument names have been renamed for clarity. For instance avoidParserProblems is now parserMassage. Beautiful Soup no longer implements a feed method. You need to pass a string or a filehandle into the soup constructor, not with feed after the soup has been created. There is still a feed method, but it's the feed method implemented by SGMLParser and calling it will bypass Beautiful Soup and cause problems. The NavigableText class has been renamed to NavigableString. There is no NavigableUnicodeString anymore, because every string inside a Beautiful Soup parse tree is a Unicode string. findText and fetchText are gone. Just pass a text argument into find or findAll. Null was more trouble than it was worth, so I got rid of it. Anything that used to return Null now returns None. Special XML constructs like comments and CDATA now have their own NavigableString subclasses, instead of being treated as oddly-formed data. If you parse a document that contains CDATA and write it back out, the CDATA will still be there. When you're parsing a document, you can get Beautiful Soup to convert XML or HTML entities into the corresponding Unicode characters. [Doc reference] = 2.1.1 (20050918) = Fixed a serious performance bug in BeautifulStoneSoup which was causing parsing to be incredibly slow. Corrected several entities that were previously being incorrectly translated from Microsoft smart-quote-like characters. Fixed a bug that was breaking text fetch. Fixed a bug that crashed the parser when text chunks that look like HTML tag names showed up within a SCRIPT tag. THEAD, TBODY, and TFOOT tags are now nestable within TABLE tags. Nested tables should parse more sensibly now. BASE is now considered a self-closing tag. = 2.1.0 "Game, or any other dish?" (20050504) = Added a wide variety of new search methods which, given a starting point inside the tree, follow a particular navigation member (like nextSibling) over and over again, looking for Tag and NavigableText objects that match certain criteria. The new methods are findNext, fetchNext, findPrevious, fetchPrevious, findNextSibling, fetchNextSiblings, findPreviousSibling, fetchPreviousSiblings, findParent, and fetchParents. All of these use the same basic code used by first and fetch, so you can pass your weird ways of matching things into these methods. The fetch method and its derivatives now accept a limit argument. You can now pass keyword arguments when calling a Tag object as though it were a method. Fixed a bug that caused all hand-created tags to share a single set of attributes. = 2.0.3 (20050501) = Fixed Python 2.2 support for iterators. Fixed a bug that gave the wrong representation to tags within quote tags like <script>. Took some code from Mark Pilgrim that treats CDATA declarations as data instead of ignoring them. Beautiful Soup's setup.py will now do an install even if the unit tests fail. It won't build a source distribution if the unit tests fail, so I can't release a new version unless they pass. = 2.0.2 (20050416) = Added the unit tests in a separate module, and packaged it with distutils. Fixed a bug that sometimes caused renderContents() to return a Unicode string even if there was no Unicode in the original string. Added the done() method, which closes all of the parser's open tags. It gets called automatically when you pass in some text to the constructor of a parser class; otherwise you must call it yourself. Reinstated some backwards compatibility with 1.x versions: referencing the string member of a NavigableText object returns the NavigableText object instead of throwing an error. = 2.0.1 (20050412) = Fixed a bug that caused bad results when you tried to reference a tag name shorter than 3 characters as a member of a Tag, eg. tag.table.td. Made sure all Tags have the 'hidden' attribute so that an attempt to access tag.hidden doesn't spawn an attempt to find a tag named 'hidden'. Fixed a bug in the comparison operator. = 2.0.0 "Who cares for fish?" (20050410) Beautiful Soup version 1 was very useful but also pretty stupid. I originally wrote it without noticing any of the problems inherent in trying to build a parse tree out of ambiguous HTML tags. This version solves all of those problems to my satisfaction. It also adds many new clever things to make up for the removal of the stupid things. == Parsing == The parser logic has been greatly improved, and the BeautifulSoup class should much more reliably yield a parse tree that looks like what the page author intended. For a particular class of odd edge cases that now causes problems, there is a new class, ICantBelieveItsBeautifulSoup. By default, Beautiful Soup now performs some cleanup operations on text before parsing it. This is to avoid common problems with bad definitions and self-closing tags that crash SGMLParser. You can provide your own set of cleanup operations, or turn it off altogether. The cleanup operations include fixing self-closing tags that don't close, and replacing Microsoft smart quotes and similar characters with their HTML entity equivalents. You can now get a pretty-print version of parsed HTML to get a visual picture of how Beautiful Soup parses it, with the Tag.prettify() method. == Strings and Unicode == There are separate NavigableText subclasses for ASCII and Unicode strings. These classes directly subclass the corresponding base data types. This means you can treat NavigableText objects as strings instead of having to call methods on them to get the strings. str() on a Tag always returns a string, and unicode() always returns Unicode. Previously it was inconsistent. == Tree traversal == In a first() or fetch() call, the tag name or the desired value of an attribute can now be any of the following: * A string (matches that specific tag or that specific attribute value) * A list of strings (matches any tag or attribute value in the list) * A compiled regular expression object (matches any tag or attribute value that matches the regular expression) * A callable object that takes the Tag object or attribute value as a string. It returns None/false/empty string if the given string doesn't match, and any other value if it does. This is much easier to use than SQL-style wildcards (see, regular expressions are good for something). Because of this, I took out SQL-style wildcards. I'll put them back if someone complains, but their removal simplifies the code a lot. You can use fetch() and first() to search for text in the parse tree, not just tags. There are new alias methods fetchText() and firstText() designed for this purpose. As with searching for tags, you can pass in a string, a regular expression object, or a method to match your text. If you pass in something besides a map to the attrs argument of fetch() or first(), Beautiful Soup will assume you want to match that thing against the "class" attribute. When you're scraping well-structured HTML, this makes your code a lot cleaner. 1.x and 2.x both let you call a Tag object as a shorthand for fetch(). For instance, foo("bar") is a shorthand for foo.fetch("bar"). In 2.x, you can also access a specially-named member of a Tag object as a shorthand for first(). For instance, foo.barTag is a shorthand for foo.first("bar"). By chaining these shortcuts you traverse a tree in very little code: for header in soup.bodyTag.pTag.tableTag('th'): If an element relationship (like parent or next) doesn't apply to a tag, it'll now show up Null instead of None. first() will also return Null if you ask it for a nonexistent tag. Null is an object that's just like None, except you can do whatever you want to it and it'll give you Null instead of throwing an error. This lets you do tree traversals like soup.htmlTag.headTag.titleTag without having to worry if the intermediate stages are actually there. Previously, if there was no 'head' tag in the document, headTag in that instance would have been None, and accessing its 'titleTag' member would have thrown an AttributeError. Now, you can get what you want when it exists, and get Null when it doesn't, without having to do a lot of conditionals checking to see if every stage is None. There are two new relations between page elements: previousSibling and nextSibling. They reference the previous and next element at the same level of the parse tree. For instance, if you have HTML like this: <p><ul><li>Foo<br /><li>Bar</ul> The first 'li' tag has a previousSibling of Null and its nextSibling is the second 'li' tag. The second 'li' tag has a nextSibling of Null and its previousSibling is the first 'li' tag. The previousSibling of the 'ul' tag is the first 'p' tag. The nextSibling of 'Foo' is the 'br' tag. I took out the ability to use fetch() to find tags that have a specific list of contents. See, I can't even explain it well. It was really difficult to use, I never used it, and I don't think anyone else ever used it. To the extent anyone did, they can probably use fetchText() instead. If it turns out someone needs it I'll think of another solution. == Tree manipulation == You can add new attributes to a tag, and delete attributes from a tag. In 1.x you could only change a tag's existing attributes. == Porting Considerations == There are three changes in 2.0 that break old code: In the post-1.2 release you could pass in a function into fetch(). The function took a string, the tag name. In 2.0, the function takes the actual Tag object. It's no longer to pass in SQL-style wildcards to fetch(). Use a regular expression instead. The different parsing algorithm means the parse tree may not be shaped like you expect. This will only actually affect you if your code uses one of the affected parts. I haven't run into this problem yet while porting my code. = Between 1.2 and 2.0 = This is the release to get if you want Python 1.5 compatibility. The desired value of an attribute can now be any of the following: * A string * A string with SQL-style wildcards * A compiled RE object * A callable that returns None/false/empty string if the given value doesn't match, and any other value otherwise. This is much easier to use than SQL-style wildcards (see, regular expressions are good for something). Because of this, I no longer recommend you use SQL-style wildcards. They may go away in a future release to clean up the code. Made Beautiful Soup handle processing instructions as text instead of ignoring them. Applied patch from Richie Hindle (richie at entrian dot com) that makes tag.string a shorthand for tag.contents[0].string when the tag has only one string-owning child. Added still more nestable tags. The nestable tags thing won't work in a lot of cases and needs to be rethought. Fixed an edge case where searching for "%foo" would match any string shorter than "foo". = 1.2 "Who for such dainties would not stoop?" (20040708) = Applied patch from Ben Last (ben at benlast dot com) that made Tag.renderContents() correctly handle Unicode. Made BeautifulStoneSoup even dumber by making it not implicitly close a tag when another tag of the same type is encountered; only when an actual closing tag is encountered. This change courtesy of Fuzzy (mike at pcblokes dot com). BeautifulSoup still works as before. = 1.1 "Swimming in a hot tureen" = Added more 'nestable' tags. Changed popping semantics so that when a nestable tag is encountered, tags are popped up to the previously encountered nestable tag (of whatever kind). I will revert this if enough people complain, but it should make more people's lives easier than harder. This enhancement was suggested by Anthony Baxter (anthony at interlink dot com dot au). = 1.0 "So rich and green" (20040420) = Initial release.