tag will look like "
" if the soup object was created to parse XML, but it will look like "" 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: => A future version of html5lib will turn CDATA sections into text nodes, but only within tags like