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This question is specific to BeautifulSoup4, which makes it different from the previous questions:
Why is BeautifulSoup modifying my self-closing elements?
selfClosingTags in BeautifulSoup
Since BeautifulStoneSoup is gone (the previous xml parser), how can I get bs4 to respect a new self-closing tag? For example:
import bs4
S = '''<foo> <bar a="3"/> </foo>'''
soup = bs4.BeautifulSoup(S, selfClosingTags=['bar'])
print soup.prettify()
Does not self-close the bar tag, but gives a hint. What is this tree builder that bs4 is referring to and how to I self-close the tag?
/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/bs4/__init__.py:112: UserWarning: BS4 does not respect the selfClosingTags argument to the BeautifulSoup constructor. The tree builder is responsible for understanding self-closing tags.
"BS4 does not respect the selfClosingTags argument to the "
<html>
<body>
<foo>
<bar a="3">
</bar>
</foo>
</body>
</html>
641
To use beautiful soup, you need to install it: $ pip install beautifulsoup4 . Beautiful Soup also relies on a parser, the default is lxml . You may already have it, but you should check (open IDLE and attempt to import lxml). If not, do: $ pip install lxml or $ apt-get install python-lxml .
A self-closing tag is an element of HTML code that has evolved in the language. Typically, the self-closing tag makes use of a “/” character in order to effectively close out a beginning tag enclosed in sideways carets.
It is not a real HTML parser but uses regular expressions to dive through tag soup. It is therefore more forgiving in some cases and less good in others. It is not uncommon that lxml/libxml2 parses and fixes broken HTML better, but BeautifulSoup has superiour support for encoding detection.
Beautiful Soup is a Python library for pulling data out of HTML and XML files. It works with your favorite parser to provide idiomatic ways of navigating, searching, and modifying the parse tree. It commonly saves programmers hours or days of work.
To parse XML you pass in “xml” as the second argument to the BeautifulSoup constructor.
soup = bs4.BeautifulSoup(S, 'xml')
You’ll need to have lxml installed.
You don't need to pass selfClosingTags anymore:
In [1]: import bs4
In [2]: S = '''<foo> <bar a="3"/> </foo>'''
In [3]: soup = bs4.BeautifulSoup(S, 'xml')
In [4]: print soup.prettify()
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<foo>
<bar a="3"/>
</foo>
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