Beautiful Soup is a Python package for parsing HTML/XML. The latest version of this package is version 4, imported as bs4.
Beautiful Soup is a Python library for parsing HTML and XML files, which is useful in web scraping. It can use Python's standard HTML parser as well as other parsers such as lxml or html5lib. It provides simple, idiomatic ways of navigating, searching, and modifying the parse tree. It commonly saves programmers hours or days of work.
Beautiful Soup 4 (commonly known as bs4, after the name of its Python module) is the latest version of Beautiful Soup, and is mostly backwards-compatible with Beautiful Soup 3. Beautiful Soup is published under MIT License.
From version 4.7.0, Beautiful Soup supports wide range of CSS4 selectors, adding to already rich collection of tools to select HTML/XML elements. You can read about wide range of CSS selectors and pseudo-classes here (soupsieve library - used by bs4).
To install the latest version with pip use pip install beautifulsoup4. And the library is imported in the project like this: from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
Notice: Beautiful Soup 3 works only on Python 2.x while Beautiful Soup 4 works on both Python 2 (2.7+) and Python 3
