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# Parsing HTML

Lectures: *Parsing HTML and Making Soup* and *Finding and Selecting Elements*. The sample page is `tests/fixtures/website.html`; the code is `soup_basics.py`.

## Step 1: create a soup and read the title

`BeautifulSoup(html, "html.parser")` turns the HTML text into a soup object. `soup.title.string` is the text of the title tag.

![Step 1: soup title](https://git.tirsystem.com/Tirsvad-Udemy-100-days-of-code/045-scrape-movies/raw/branch/main/docs/images/soup-1-title.png)

**What we gained:** HTML text becomes an object we can navigate, and a tag is reached with plain attribute access.

## Step 2: prettify

`soup.prettify()` writes the document with one tag per line, which makes the nesting visible.

![Step 2: prettify](https://git.tirsystem.com/Tirsvad-Udemy-100-days-of-code/045-scrape-movies/raw/branch/main/docs/images/soup-2-prettify.png)

**What we gained:** reading the structure first tells us what to ask for.

## Step 3: find all tags

`find_all("a")` returns every anchor. In a loop, `get_text()` gives the text and `get("href")` the address.

![Step 3: find_all](https://git.tirsystem.com/Tirsvad-Udemy-100-days-of-code/045-scrape-movies/raw/branch/main/docs/images/soup-3-find-all.png)

**What we gained:** one call finds many elements, and a loop turns them into data.

## Step 4: find by id and by class

`find(id="name")` finds one tag by its id. `find_all("h3", class_="heading")` filters by tag and class; the keyword is `class_` because `class` is a Python keyword.

![Step 4: find by attribute](https://git.tirsystem.com/Tirsvad-Udemy-100-days-of-code/045-scrape-movies/raw/branch/main/docs/images/soup-4-find.png)

**What we gained:** attributes narrow a search, and we avoid clashes with reserved words.

## Step 5: CSS selectors

`select_one("p a")` and `select(".heading")` use the same selectors as CSS, so nested elements are reached in one expression.

![Step 5: select](https://git.tirsystem.com/Tirsvad-Udemy-100-days-of-code/045-scrape-movies/raw/branch/main/docs/images/soup-5-select.png)

**What we gained:** CSS selectors are the shortest way to describe where an element sits in the document.

## What we gained

We can read an HTML file into BeautifulSoup, look at its structure and pick out single or many elements by tag, id, class or CSS selector.