Parsing HTML with BeautifulSoup
find(), select(), CSS selectors, and extracting structured content from HTML.
Why Parse HTML in Agents?
Many data sources are not APIs — they are web pages. When an agent needs to extract structured information from HTML, it must parse the raw markup into a navigable tree.
BeautifulSoup (bs4) is the standard Python library for this. It turns messy HTML into a Python object you can query with ease.
Creating a BeautifulSoup Object
Pass raw HTML and a parser name to BeautifulSoup(). The 'html.parser' is built into Python and requires no extra install. For faster parsing of large pages, 'lxml' is available via pip.
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import httpx
# Fetch HTML
response = httpx.get('https://example.com', timeout=10.0)
html = response.text
# Parse it
soup = BeautifulSoup(html, 'html.parser')
# Get the page title
print(soup.title.text) # 'Example Domain'All lessons in this course
- HTTP Clients for Agents: httpx and requests
- Parsing HTML with BeautifulSoup
- Handling Pagination and Dynamic Content
- Respectful Scraping Practices