BeautifulSoup – Scraping Paragraphs from HTML

In this article, we will discuss how to scrap paragraphs from HTML using Beautiful Soup

Method 1: using bs4 and urllib.

Module Needed:

• bs4: Beautiful Soup(bs4) is a Python library for pulling data out of HTML and XML files. For installing the module-

pip install bs4.

• urllib: urllib is a package that collects several modules for working with URLs. It can also be installed the same way, it is most of the in-built in the environment itself.

pip install urllib

The html file contains several tags and like the anchor tag <a>, span tag <span>, paragraph tag <p> etc. So, the beautiful soup helps us to parse the html file and get our desired output such as getting the paragraphs from a particular url/html file.

Explanation: 

After importing the modules urllib and bs4 we will provide a variable with a url which is to be read, the urllib.request.urlopen() function forwards the requests to the server for opening the url. BeautifulSoup() function helps us to parse the html file or you say the encoding in html. The loop used here with find_all() finds all the tags containing paragraph tag <p></p> and the text between them are collected by the get_text() method.

Below is the implementation:

Output:

Methods 2: using requests and bs4

Module Needed:

• bs4: Beautiful Soup(bs4) is a Python library for pulling data out of HTML and XML files. This module does not come built-in with Python. To install this type the below command in the terminal.

pip install bs4

• requests: Requests allows you to send HTTP/1.1 requests extremely easily. This module also does not comes built-in with Python. To install this type the below command in the terminal.

pip install requests

Approach:

• Import module
• Create an HTML document and specify the ‘<p>’ tag into the code
• Pass the HTML document into the Beautifulsoup() function
• Use the ‘P’ tag to extract paragraphs from the Beautifulsoup object
• Get text from the HTML document with get_text().

Code:

Output: