babydatajournalism:

On page 30, just after he tells us to download Python if we don’t already have it, Nathan says we should download and install Beautiful Soup, a Python library whose mission in life is to pull data out of HTML and XML files — commonly known as “scraping.”

The current release is Beautiful Soup 4.0.3 (April 3, 2012). You can install it with pip install beautifulsoup4 or easy_install beautifulsoup4. It’s also available as the python-beautifulsoup4 package in recent versions of Debian and Ubuntu.

Beautiful Soup 4 works on both Python 2 (2.7+) and Python 3.

Downloading was easy. My first hurdle was to uncompress/expand the compressed file that I had downloaded.

NOTE: Don’t bother downloading the file. Just keep reading.

Read More