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@@ -34,78 +34,8 @@ </tag3> </tag1> -= About Beautiful Soup 4 = - -This 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 one of the -other parsers, or you'll have problems handling real-world markup. - -For complete documentation, see the Sphinx documentation in -docs/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. +The bs4/doc directory contains full documentation in Sphinx +format. Run "make html" to create HTML documentation. = Running the unit tests = |