Month: April 2015

“Getting Started with Beautiful Soup”, book review

Published on: 01.04.2015

Getting_Started_with_Beautiful_Soup-Book_Cover

Number of pages: 130
Written by: Vineeth G. Nair
Publish by: PACKT Publishing

I have been using Beautiful Soup at least for last 3 years for web scraping.
I learned it by practice and reading documentation.

As far as I know this is first book about Beautiful Soup, so I was really excite to read it.
I prefer learning from book, tutorial as second choice, last choice is from documentation.

Form somebody who is starting to use Beautiful Soup I would recommend this book, even somebody who had used Beautiful Soup (like myself) can find value in it.

What I have learned from “Getting Started with Beautiful Soup” book:

  • Beautiful Soup can be used to change the content of an HTML/XML document.
  • how to set input encoding for Beautiful Soup document
  • default output encoding for .prettif() and .encode() is UTF-8, but it can be changed also.
  • different formatters (minimal, html , None , function) can be passed as parameters to prettify(), encode(), and decode()
  • get_text() return all text from page (including JavaScript)