BeautifulSoup

Screen-scraping library

beautifulsoup v3.2.2 156.8K downloads/30d#10,775 on PyPI

Permissive license MIT Abandoned released 2019-10-05

What it is and what it does

Beautiful Soup is a screen-scraping library that parses HTML and XML documents into a tree structure, providing Pythonic methods to search, iterate, and modify the parsed content. It sits on top of an underlying HTML or XML parser and abstracts away the parsing details so you can focus on extracting data from markup.

This package is version 3.2.2, the final release of the 3.x series from 2019. Development ended in 2011, and the maintainers have explicitly discontinued this version in favor of beautifulsoup4. The package carries no runtime dependencies and installs with low friction, but it is no longer maintained and is not recommended for new projects.

Use it for:

Extract data from static HTML pages when you are locked into Python 2.7 and cannot upgrade
Parse XML documents in legacy systems where beautifulsoup4 is not available
Maintain or debug existing code that depends on Beautiful Soup 3.x without immediate migration

Worth the install?

AI-flagged interpretation of the facts on this page — verify before relying

Beautiful Soup parses HTML and XML documents into a navigable tree, allowing you to search, iterate, and modify the parsed structure using Python idioms.

No. This package is abandoned and explicitly superseded by beautifulsoup4. The maintainers recommend migrating to beautifulsoup4 instead. Install only if you are maintaining legacy code that cannot be updated and have no other option; for any new project, use beautifulsoup4.

Install

beautifulsoup on PyPI

pip

pip install beautifulsoup

uv

uv add beautifulsoup

poetry

poetry add beautifulsoup

Installing BeautifulSoup

Before you install

Installation is straightforward with no runtime dependencies, but the package is abandoned as of 2019 and explicitly superseded by beautifulsoup4. The 3.x series ended development in 2011.

License in practice

Licensed under the MIT license (permissive), which places no restrictions on use, modification, or distribution.

Quickstart

pip install beautifulsoup==3.2.2

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
soup = BeautifulSoup('<html><body>Hello</body></html>')
print(soup.find('body'))

This version targets Python 2.7 and is no longer maintained; the maintainers explicitly recommend migrating to beautifulsoup4 instead.

Verify before relying

Whether the package still works reliably with modern Python versions beyond 2.7
Current state of the homepage at http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/ and availability of migration guides

Package facts

License	MIT (permissive)
Python support	not specified
Install friction	low — pure-Python wheel
Runtime dependencies	none
Maintenance	abandoned — 2,505 days since the last release
First released	2010-11-21
Downloads	156,790/month — #10,775 on PyPI (30-day window, as of 2026-08-14)
Known vulnerabilities	none known (OSV.dev, checked 2026-08-14)

Evidence: BeautifulSoup-3.2.2-py2-none-any.whl

Development Status :: 5 - Production/StableIntended Audience :: DevelopersLicense :: OSI Approved :: Python Software Foundation LicenseProgramming Language :: PythonProgramming Language :: Python :: 2.7Topic :: Software Development :: Libraries :: Python ModulesTopic :: Text Processing :: Markup :: HTMLTopic :: Text Processing :: Markup :: SGMLTopic :: Text Processing :: Markup :: XML