Don't put html, head and body tags automatically, beautifulsoup

In [35]: import bs4 as bs

In [36]: bs.BeautifulSoup('<h1>FOO</h1>', "html.parser")
Out[36]: <h1>FOO</h1>

This parses the HTML with Python's builtin HTML parser. Quoting the docs:

Unlike html5lib, this parser makes no attempt to create a well-formed HTML document by adding a <body> tag. Unlike lxml, it doesn’t even bother to add an <html> tag.

Alternatively, you could use the html5lib parser and just select the element after <body>:

In [61]: soup = bs.BeautifulSoup('<h1>FOO</h1>', 'html5lib')

In [62]: soup.body.next
Out[62]: <h1>FOO</h1>

Let's first create a soup sample:

soup=BeautifulSoup("<head></head><body><p>content</p></body>")

You could get html and body's child by specify soup.body.<tag>:

# python3: get body's first child
print(next(soup.body.children))

# if first child's tag is rss
print(soup.body.rss)

Also you could use unwrap() to remove body, head, and html

soup.html.body.unwrap()
if soup.html.select('> head'):
    soup.html.head.unwrap()
soup.html.unwrap()

If you load xml file, bs4.diagnose(data) will tell you to use lxml-xml, which will not wrap your soup with html+body

>>> BS('<foo>xxx</foo>', 'lxml-xml')
<foo>xxx</foo>

Your only option is to not use html5lib to parse the data.

That's a feature of the html5lib library, it fixes HTML that is lacking, such as adding back in missing required elements.

Tags:

Python

Beautifulsoup

Html5Lib

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