BeautifulSoup and lxml.html – what to prefer?

The simple answer, imo, is that if you trust your source to be well-formed, go with the lxml solution. Otherwise, BeautifulSoup all the way.

Edit:

This answer is three years old now; it’s worth noting, as Jonathan Vanasco does in the comments, that BeautifulSoup4 now supports using lxml as the internal parser, so you can use the advanced features and interface of BeautifulSoup without most of the performance hit, if you wish (although I still reach straight for lxml myself — perhaps it’s just force of habit :)).

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