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Getting Started with Beautiful Soup

You're reading from   Getting Started with Beautiful Soup Learn how to extract information from websites using Beautiful Soup and the Python urllib2 module. This practical, hands-on guide covers everything you need to know to get a head start in website scraping.

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Product type Paperback
Published in Jan 2014
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781783289554
Length 130 pages
Edition 1st Edition
Languages
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Author (1):
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Vineeth G Nair Vineeth G Nair
Author Profile Icon Vineeth G Nair
Vineeth G Nair
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Toc

Encoding in Beautiful Soup

As already explained, every HTML/XML document will be written in a specific character set encoding, for example, UTF-8, and Latin-1. In an HTML page, this is represented using the meta tag as shown in the following example:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8">

Beautiful Soup uses the UnicodeDammit library to automatically detect the encoding of the document. Beautiful Soup converts the content to Unicode while creating soup objects from the document.

Note

Unicode is a character set, which is a list of characters with unique numbers. For example, in the Unicode character set, the number for the character B is 42. UTF-8 encoding is an algorithm that is used to convert these numbers into a binary representation.

In the previous example, Beautiful Soup converts the document to Unicode.

html_markup = """<p> The Spanish language is written using the Spanish alphabet, which is the Latin alphabet...
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