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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-13T06:13:19+00:00

From what I can make out, the two main HTML parsing libraries in Python

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From what I can make out, the two main HTML parsing libraries in Python are lxml and BeautifulSoup. I’ve chosen BeautifulSoup for a project I’m working on, but I chose it for no particular reason other than finding the syntax a bit easier to learn and understand. But I see a lot of people seem to favour lxml and I’ve heard that lxml is faster.

So I’m wondering what are the advantages of one over the other? When would I want to use lxml and when would I be better off using BeautifulSoup? Are there any other libraries worth considering?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    For starters, BeautifulSoup is no longer actively maintained, and the author even recommends alternatives such as lxml.

    Quoting from the linked page:

    Version 3.1.0 of Beautiful Soup does
    significantly worse on real-world HTML
    than version 3.0.8 does. The most
    common problems are handling
    tags incorrectly, “malformed start
    tag” errors, and “bad end tag” errors.
    This page explains what happened, how
    the problem will be addressed, and
    what you can do right now.

    This page was originally written in
    March 2009. Since then, the 3.2 series
    has been released, replacing the 3.1
    series, and development of the 4.x
    series has gotten underway. This page
    will remain up for historical
    purposes.

    tl;dr

    Use 3.2.0 instead.

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