The Dormouse's story
\nOnce upon a time there were three little sisters; and their names were\nElsie,\nLacie and\nTillie;\nand they lived at the bottom of a well.
\n...
\n\n\"\"\"\n\n# Create a BeautifulSoup object\nsoup = BeautifulSoup(html_doc, 'html.parser')\n\n# Pretty-print the HTML\nprint(\"\\n--- Pretty Printed HTML ---\")\nprint(soup.prettify())\n\n# Accessing tags\nprint(\"\\n--- Page Title ---\")\nprint(soup.title.string)\n\n# Finding all links\nprint(\"\\n--- All Links ---\")\nfor link in soup.find_all('a'):\n print(link.get('href'))\n\n# Finding an element by ID\nprint(\"\\n--- Link with ID 'link3' ---\")\nlink3 = soup.find(id=\"link3\")\nif link3: # Check if link3 was found before accessing attributes\n print(link3.get_text())\n\n# Using CSS selectors (requires soupsieve, which is a dependency)\nprint(\"\\n--- Paragraphs with class 'story' ---\")\nfor p_tag in soup.select('p.story'):\n print(p_tag.get_text(strip=True))","lang":"python","description":"This quickstart demonstrates basic parsing of an HTML document, pretty-printing the output, accessing specific tags like the title, finding all elements of a certain type (e.g., links), finding an element by its ID, and using CSS selectors to locate elements with a specific class."},"warnings":[{"fix":"Ensure your project uses Python 3.7 or newer. If migrating from Beautiful Soup 3, review the porting guide for significant API changes.","message":"Beautiful Soup 4 discontinued official support for Python 2 on December 31, 2020. The last version to support Python 2 was 4.9.3. New development targets Python 3.7+ (current versions require Python >=3.7.0). Running BS4 code on Python 2, or Python 2 BS3 code on Python 3, will result in `ImportError` or unexpected behavior.","severity":"breaking","affected_versions":"4.9.4+"},{"fix":"Consult the 'Porting code to BS4' section in the official documentation for a comprehensive list of changes. Update import statements and attribute/method calls accordingly.","message":"When migrating from Beautiful Soup 3 to Beautiful Soup 4, several attributes and methods were renamed for PEP 8 compliance. For example, `Tag.next` became `Tag.next_element`, and `Tag.previous` became `Tag.previous_element`. The primary import also changed from `from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup` to `from bs4 import BeautifulSoup`.","severity":"breaking","affected_versions":"All BS4 versions when migrating from BS3"},{"fix":"Install `lxml` and/or `html5lib` via `pip install lxml html5lib` for better performance and robustness. Always specify the parser explicitly (e.g., `BeautifulSoup(markup, 'lxml')` or `BeautifulSoup(markup, 'html5lib')`).","message":"Beautiful Soup relies on an underlying HTML/XML parser. While Python's built-in `html.parser` is the default, it is often less performant and more prone to issues with malformed HTML than `lxml` or `html5lib`. Not installing an external parser can lead to slower parsing, different parse trees, or crashes with certain documents.","severity":"gotcha","affected_versions":"All versions"},{"fix":"Update your code to use the recommended, non-deprecated alternatives. Review the `DeprecationWarning` messages for specific guidance or consult the latest Beautiful Soup documentation.","message":"Starting with Beautiful Soup 4.13.0, many methods that were previously documented as deprecated now explicitly issue `DeprecationWarning` when used. These methods, including the `BeautifulStoneSoup` class and `parentGenerator`, are scheduled for removal in future versions (e.g., 4.15.0).","severity":"deprecated","affected_versions":"4.13.0+"},{"fix":"If using Beautiful Soup 4.13.0 or newer, uninstall the `types-beautifulsoup4` package (`pip uninstall types-beautifulsoup4`). The built-in type hints are now sufficient.","message":"For Beautiful Soup versions 4.13.0 and newer, type annotations are included directly within the `beautifulsoup4` package. If you were previously using the `types-beautifulsoup4` stub package for type checking, it can lead to conflicts or incorrect type resolution.","severity":"gotcha","affected_versions":"4.13.0+"},{"fix":"Install the `requests` library using pip: `pip install requests`.","message":"The `requests` library, which is commonly used for making HTTP requests in web scraping scripts, is not installed. Attempting to import `requests` without it being available in the environment will lead to a `ModuleNotFoundError`.","severity":"breaking","affected_versions":"All versions"},{"fix":"Install the 'requests' library using pip: `pip install requests`.","message":"The application failed because the 'requests' library was not found. While 'requests' is frequently used in conjunction with Beautiful Soup to fetch web pages, it is not a direct dependency of the 'beautifulsoup4' package itself. This error occurs if 'requests' is imported in the application script but was not installed alongside 'beautifulsoup4'.","severity":"breaking","affected_versions":"N/A (external dependency issue)"}],"env_vars":null,"last_verified":"2026-05-12T12:04:05.878Z","next_check":"2026-06-27T00:00:00.000Z","problems":[{"fix":"Install the library using pip: `pip install beautifulsoup4` (note the 'beautifulsoup4' package name, not 'bs4'). If already installed, ensure your IDE or script is using the correct Python interpreter where it's installed.","cause":"The beautifulsoup4 library is not installed in the Python environment being used, or there's a mismatch between the installed package name and the import statement.","error":"ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'bs4'"},{"fix":"Always check if the result of `find()` or `select_one()` is not `None` before attempting to access its attributes or methods. For example: `element = soup.find('div', class_='my-class'); if element: print(element.get_text())`.","cause":"This error occurs when `find()` or `select_one()` methods in Beautiful Soup do not find any matching element and return `None`. Subsequent attempts to call a method (like `get_text()`) on this `None` object lead to the `AttributeError`.","error":"AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'get_text' (or 'find', 'contents', etc.)"},{"fix":"Ensure you are importing the `BeautifulSoup` class directly: `from bs4 import BeautifulSoup`. Then, create your soup object as `soup = BeautifulSoup(markup, 'html.parser')`.","cause":"This typically happens when you import the `bs4` module itself and then try to call `bs4()` as if it were the `BeautifulSoup` class, instead of importing the `BeautifulSoup` class specifically from `bs4`.","error":"TypeError: 'module' object is not callable"},{"fix":"Use the `.get()` method to safely access attributes, which returns `None` if the attribute does not exist, preventing a `KeyError`. For example: `link = tag.get('href')`.","cause":"This error occurs when you try to access an attribute using dictionary-style lookup (`tag['attribute']`) on a tag that does not possess that specific attribute.","error":"KeyError: 'href' (or 'class', etc.)"},{"fix":"Extract the HTML content from the `requests.Response` object using `.text` (for string content) or `.content` (for bytes content) before passing it to BeautifulSoup. For example: `soup = BeautifulSoup(response.text, 'html.parser')`.","cause":"You are passing a `requests.Response` object directly to the `BeautifulSoup` constructor instead of its text or content.","error":"TypeError: Incoming markup is of an invalid type: