Beautiful Soup and Table Scraping – lxml vs html parser

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Short answer.

If you already installed lxml, just use it.

html.parser – BeautifulSoup(markup, "html.parser")

  • Advantages: Batteries included, Decent speed, Lenient (as of Python
    2.7.3 and 3.2.)

  • Disadvantages: Not very lenient (before Python 2.7.3 or 3.2.2)

lxml – BeautifulSoup(markup, "lxml")

  • Advantages: Very fast, Lenient

  • Disadvantages: External C dependency

html5lib – BeautifulSoup(markup, "html5lib")

  • Advantages: Extremely lenient, Parses pages the same way a web browser does, Creates valid HTML5

  • Disadvantages: Very slow, External Python dependency

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