Learn Beautiful Soup

This is a full Beautiful Soup course for the Swiftener Beautiful Soup editor. BeautifulSoup is already imported from bs4. Pandas is pd. You type in that tab, press Ctrl+Enter (or Cmd+Enter), and print what you found.

You do not install Python, pip, or Jupyter. Code and uploaded files stay in your browser.

Tables without HTML belong in Learn pandas. This course stays on parsing markup.

How to take the course

1. Keep this tutorial tab and the Beautiful Soup workbench side by side.
2. Wait until the workbench status says Beautiful Soup is ready. The first load installs the library in the tab.
3. Copy an exercise, paste it as the whole editor, run it, then read the console. Each shaded block is a complete script — it does not rely on leftover variables.
4. Always pass "html.parser". When a chapter asks for a file, download it from the buttons above, then click Add files in the workbench.

The workbench Snippets menu is a cheat sheet. Prefer the exercises here — they are written for this editor.

What this editor can and cannot do

• Can: BeautifulSoup, pd, print, HTML / XML uploads, writes to /uploads, downloads.
• Cannot: fetching live URLs (requests.get, urllib), lxml / html5lib parsers, Jupyter magics, installing extra PyPI packages beyond what the app already loads (beautifulsoup4, pandas, numpy).
• Always print(...) a result. A bare soup at the end of a script is not displayed the way Jupyter would.

City names in the examples are Nairobi, Mombasa, Kisumu (then Nakuru on the sample page).

Sample files

Download any of these from the banner, then attach them with Add files:

• kiosk.html — nav, product list, sales table, and a small form
• article.html — headings, paragraphs, and a few links
• messy.html — unclosed tags and extra spaces (html.parser repairs them)
• feed.xml — a tiny RSS-like feed (parse it with html.parser too)

Chapter list

Work in order the first time. After that, jump around from the sidebar.