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 :)).

Related Posts:

  1. Where is BeautifulSoup4 hiding?
  2. How to remove \xa0 from string in Python?
  3. What is the meaning of [:] in python [duplicate]
  4. Understand the Find() function in Beautiful Soup
  5. builtins.TypeError: must be str, not bytes
  6. ImportError: No Module Named bs4 (BeautifulSoup)
  7. Difference between BeautifulSoup and Scrapy crawler?
  8. Using BeautifulSoup to search HTML for string
  9. Flask example with POST
  10. UnicodeEncodeError: ‘ascii’ codec can’t encode character u’\xa0′ in position 20: ordinal not in range(128)
  11. BeautifulSoup getting href
  12. How to find elements by class
  13. How can I from bs4 import BeautifulSoup?
  14. Get an attribute value based on the name attribute with BeautifulSoup
  15. UnicodeEncodeError: ‘charmap’ codec can’t encode characters
  16. python BeautifulSoup parsing table
  17. can we use XPath with BeautifulSoup?
  18. What should I use to open a url instead of urlopen in urllib3
  19. Can I remove script tags with BeautifulSoup?
  20. ImportError: No module named BeautifulSoup
  21. Installing lxml module in python
  22. Parse the JavaScript returned from BeautifulSoup
  23. Converting dictionary to JSON
  24. Saving and loading objects and using pickle
  25. numpy: Invalid value encountered in true_divide
  26. Invalid character in identifier
  27. Is “from matplotlib import pyplot as plt” == “import matplotlib.pyplot as plt”?
  28. ‘str’ object does not support item assignment
  29. What does `ValueError: cannot reindex from a duplicate axis` mean?
  30. JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)
  31. How to print an exception in Python?
  32. What are “named tuples” in Python?
  33. What do these operators mean (** , ^ , %, //)? [closed]
  34. Python open() gives FileNotFoundError/IOError: Errno 2 No such file or directory
  35. Jupyter Notebook not saving: ‘_xsrf’ argument missing from post
  36. FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory
  37. ValueError: all the input arrays must have same number of dimensions
  38. Get the data received in a Flask request
  39. Python function execution
  40. Where do I find the bashrc file on Mac?
  41. ValueError: setting an array element with a sequence
  42. Why does num = 100?
  43. How do order of operations go on Python?
  44. Python group by
  45. What is the difference between pip and conda?
  46. How to clear variables in ipython?
  47. How does the “view” method work in PyTorch?
  48. TypeError: generatecode() takes 0 positional arguments but 1 was given
  49. python – if not in list
  50. syntaxError: ‘continue’ not properly in loop
  52. TypeError(“‘bool’ object is not iterable”,) when trying to return a Boolean
  53. Flask Template Not found
  54. Making a collatz program automate the boring stuff
  55. Reverse / invert a dictionary mapping
  56. using pip3: module “importlib._bootstrap” has no attribute “SourceFileLoader”
  57. TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for -: ‘list’ and ‘list’
  58. What’s the difference between a Python module and a Python package?
  59. How to overcome “datetime.datetime not JSON serializable”?
  60. AttributeError: ‘datetime’ module has no attribute ‘strptime’
  61. Where does this come from: -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
  62. Open file in a relative location in Python
  63. Python add item to the tuple
  64. SyntaxError invalid token
  65. TypeError: ‘type’ object is not iterable – Iterating over object instances
  66. How to check the version of scipy
  67. How to check if type of a variable is string?
  68. How to print colored text to the terminal
  69. Viewing all defined variables
  70. Difference between two dates in Python
  71. ImportError: No module named win32com.client
  72. Error message “Linter pylint is not installed”
  73. AttributeError: ‘Tensor’ object has no attribute ‘_keras_history’
  74. pip install -r requirements.txt [Errno 2] No such file or directory: ‘requirements.txt’
  75. RuntimeWarning: overflow encountered in ubyte_scalars
  76. Pandas – Drop function error (label not contained in axis)
  77. Python Requests – No connection adapters
  78. WindowsError: [Error 126] The specified module could not be found
  79. No module named ‘openpyxl’ – Python 3.4 – Ubuntu
  80. How to easily print ascii-art text?
  81. Using Tkinter in python to edit the title bar
  82. LinAlgError: Last 2 dimensions of the array must be square
  83. Python requests SSL error – certificate verify failed
  84. How to know/change current directory in Python shell?
  85. Trying to run Flask app gives “Address already in use”
  86. What is a unicode string?
  87. Remove specific characters from a string in Python
  88. pandas replace multiple values one column
  89. AttributeError: ‘tuple’ object has no attribute
  90. Can’t install Scipy through pip
  91. How to run python code in Sublime Text 3?
  92. Random word generator- Python
  93. How can I install the Beautiful Soup module on the Mac?
  94. What is python’s site-packages directory?
  95. How do I get Flask to run on port 80?
  96. optional arguments in initializer of python class
  97. How can I check if a string contains ANY letters from the alphabet?
  98. How do I calculate the MD5 checksum of a file in Python?
  99. Indent Expected?
  100. How exactly does a generator comprehension work?

Leave a Comment