Beautiful Soup 3.2.0 features very little new functionality, but its version
number leapfrogs the defunct 3.1 series, preventing confusion about which
version is the latest.
However, the web site also says this about our previous version:
Beautiful Soup version 3.1.0.1 was released January 6, 2009. It won't work
very well — I consider it a failed experiment.
Beautiful Soup is a Python HTML/XML parser designed for quick turnaround
projects like screen-scraping. Three features make it powerful:
1. Beautiful Soup won't choke if you give it bad markup. It yields a parse
tree that makes approximately as much sense as your original document. This
is usually good enough to collect the data you need and run away.
2. Beautiful Soup provides a few simple methods and Pythonic idioms for
navigating, searching, and modifying a parse tree: a toolkit for dissecting
a document and extracting what you need. You don't have to create a custom
parser for each application.
3. Beautiful Soup automatically converts incoming documents to Unicode and
outgoing documents to UTF-8. You don't have to think about encodings, unless
the document doesn't specify an encoding and Beautiful Soup can't autodetect
one. Then you just have to specify the original encoding.
