= 4.0 = == Better method names == Methods have been renamed to comply with PEP 8. The old names still work. Here are the renames: * findAll -> find_all * findAllNext -> find_all_next * findAllPrevious -> find_all_previous * findNext -> find_next * findNextSibling -> find_next_sibling * findNextSiblings -> find_next_siblings * findParent -> find_parent * findParents -> find_parents * findPrevious -> find_previous * findPreviousSibling -> find_previous_sibling * findPreviousSiblings -> find_previous_siblings == Generators are now properties == The generators have been given more sensible (and PEP 8-compliant) names, and turned into properties: * childGenerator() -> children * nextGenerator() -> next_elements * nextSiblingGenerator() -> next_siblings * previousGenerator() -> previous_elements * previousSiblingGenerator() -> previous_siblings * recursiveChildGenerator() -> recursive_children * parentGenerator() -> parents So instead of this: for parent in tag.parentGenerator(): ... You can write this: for parent in tag.parents: ... (But the old code will still work.) == tag.string is recursive == tag.string now operates recursively. If tag A contains a single tag B and nothing else, then A.string is the same as B.string. So: foo The value of a.string used to be None, and now it's "foo". == Entities are always converted to Unicode == An HTML or XML entity is always converted into the corresponding Unicode character. There are no longer any smartQuotesTo or convertEntities arguments. (Unicode Dammit still has smartQuotesTo, though that may change.) = 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: baz ', '"> 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. 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 occured 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 
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