Creating a BeautifulSoup object

Creating a BeautifulSoup object is the starting point of any Beautiful Soup project. A BeautifulSoup object represents the input HTML/XML document used for its creation.

BeautifulSoup is created by passing a string or a file-like object (this can be an open handle to the files stored locally in our machine or a web page).

Creating a BeautifulSoup object from a string

A string can be passed to the BeautifulSoup constructor to create an object as follows:

helloworld = "<p>Hello World</p>"
soup_string = BeautifulSoup(helloworld)

Tip

Downloading the example code

You can download the example code files for all Packt books you have purchased from your account at http://www.packtpub.com. If you purchased this book elsewhere, you can visit http://www.packtpub.com/support and register to have the files e-mailed directly to you.

The previous code will create the BeautifulSoup object based on the input string helloworld. We can see that the input has...