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Asked: 2026-05-11T10:11:25+00:00

I am trying to parse an html page with BeautifulSoup, but it appears that

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I am trying to parse an html page with BeautifulSoup, but it appears that BeautifulSoup doesn’t like the html or that page at all. When I run the code below, the method prettify() returns me only the script block of the page (see below). Does anybody has an idea why it happens? 

import urllib2 from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup  url = 'http://www.futureshop.ca/catalog/subclass.asp?catid=10607&mfr=&logon=&langid=FR&sort=0&page=1' html = ''.join(urllib2.urlopen(url).readlines()) print '-- HTML ------------------------------------------' print html print '-- BeautifulSoup ---------------------------------' print BeautifulSoup(html).prettify()

The is the output produced by BeautifulSoup.

-- BeautifulSoup --------------------------------- <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC '-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN' 'http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd'> <meta http-equiv='Content-Type' content='text/html; charset=utf-8' /> <script language='JavaScript'>  <!--      function highlight(img) {        document[img].src = '/marketing/sony/images/en/' + img + '_on.gif';      }       function unhighlight(img) {        document[img].src = '/marketing/sony/images/en/' + img + '_off.gif';      } //--> </script>

Thanks!

UPDATE: I am using the following version, which appears to be the latest.

__author__ = 'Leonard Richardson (leonardr@segfault.org)' __version__ = '3.1.0.1' __copyright__ = 'Copyright (c) 2004-2009 Leonard Richardson' __license__ = 'New-style BSD'
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1 Answer

  1. Try with version 3.0.7a as Łukasz suggested. BeautifulSoup 3.1 was designed to be compatible with Python 3.0 so they had to change the parser from SGMLParser to HTMLParser which seems more vulnerable to bad HTML.

    From the changelog for BeautifulSoup 3.1:

    ‘Beautiful Soup is now based on HTMLParser rather than SGMLParser, which is gone in Python 3. There’s some bad HTML that SGMLParser handled but HTMLParser doesn’t’

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