--- id: beautifulsoup version: "3.2.2" license: MIT license_treatment: permissive maintenance: abandoned --- # BeautifulSoup — Screen-scraping library License: permissive · Maintenance: abandoned · Downloads: 156.8K/mo ## 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 The package carries no runtime dependencies and installs with low friction, but it is no longer maintained and is not recommended for new projects.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 above — 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 No. This package is abandoned and explicitly superseded by beautifulsoup4.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 pip install beautifulsoup uv add beautifulsoup 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Installation is straightforward with no runtime dependencies, but the package is abandoned as of 2019 and explicitly superseded by beautifulsoup4.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import BeautifulSoup soup = BeautifulSoup('Hello') print(soup.find('body')) This version targets Python 2.7 and is no longer maintained; the maintainers explicitly recommend migrating to beautifulsoup4 instead.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: unspecified - Install friction: low - Maintenance: abandoned - Downloads: 156.8K/month (top 15,000 on PyPI) - Known vulnerabilities: none known ## Tags html parsing python, web scraping library, xml parser, html tree navigation, parse html documents, screen scraping, markup parsing, legacy, end-of-life [View on SkillFed](https://skillfed.io/packages/beautifulsoup) · [View on PyPI](https://pypi.org/project/beautifulsoup/)