Parsing HTML with Python 2.7 - HTMLParser, SGMLParser, or Beautiful Soup?

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I want to do some screen-scraping with Python 2.7, and I have no context for the differences between HTMLParser, SGMLParser, or Beautiful Soup.

Are these all trying to solve the same problem, or do they exist for different reasons? Which is simplest, which is most robust, and which (if any) is the default choice?

Also, please let me know if I have overlooked a significant option.

Edit: I should mention that I'm not particularly experienced in HTML parsing, and I'm particularly interested in which will get me moving the quickest, with the goal of parsing HTML on one particular site.

beautifulsoup html-parsing parsing html python
4 Answers

Take a look at Scrapy. It is a python framework specifically for scrapping. It makes it very easy to extract information using the XPath to the element. It also has some very interesting capabilities such as defining models for the scraped data (to be able to export it in different formats), authentication and recursively following links.

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