Remove HTML Tags Using Beautifulsoup

Within the realm of web scraping and data manipulation, the common practice involves eliminating HTML tags from an HTML document. This task is frequently accomplished through the utilization of a Python tool called Beautifulsoup. Beautifulsoup empowers users to retrieve information from online sources and apply it in diverse applications.

Throughout this guide, we will explore how to eliminate HTML tags utilizing the attractive library and grasp the significance of this procedure. The following are the sequential steps that can be effortlessly executed to complete this task.

Steps to Setup Working Environment

Proceed with the following instructions in the specified sequence to configure the operational environment.

Execute the installation of Beautiful Soup:

pip install beautifulsoup4

Execute the following pip command in your terminal to install the beautifulsoup4 package. This library is designed to assist you in web scraping tasks that you may need to carry out.

1. Import Beautiful Soup:
Example
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from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
Try it Yourself

Once the installation of the beautifulsoup4 library is done, proceed to import it into your Python script with the provided code line.

Next, instantiate a BeautifulSoup object:

html_content = "<p>This is <b>HTML</b> content.</p>"
soup = BeautifulSoup(html_content, 'html.parser')

Utilizing just two lines of code, you can generate an HTML script by manipulating Python strings and subsequently execute the parsing of said script.

1. HTML Tag Removal:
Example
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text_content = soup.text
Try it Yourself

This code snippet retrieves the text content from the processed HTML document and eliminates any HTML tags present in the parsed HTML document.

How to Remove HTML Tags using Beautifulsoup

Once you have finished following these procedures, you will be able to effortlessly eliminate the HTML tags from an HTML document using Beautiful Soup.

Code:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

# HTML content with tags
html_content = "<p>This is <b>HTML</b> content.</p>"

# Create a BeautifulSoup object
soup = BeautifulSoup(html_content, 'html.parser')

# Remove HTML tags and get the text content
text_content = soup.text

# Display the result
print("Original HTML content:", html_content)
print("Text content without HTML tags:", text_content)

Output:

Original HTML content: <p>This is <b>HTML</b> content.</p>
Text content without HTML tags: This is HTML content.

Why to Remove HTML Tags

In web scraping, there can be various objectives for removing HTML tags from an HTML script. This is a widely practiced task in web scraping. Following are the reasons to remove HTML tags from an HTML script.

• ✅ Enhanced Readability: When data is presented or shown to end users, readability is improved by deleting HTML elements. It is often preferred by users to view material free of HTML tag clutter, since this makes it easier to use.
• ✅ Text Extraction: The textual content rather than the HTML structure is frequently what you are interested in when you scrape data from websites. By removing the HTML tags, you may extract and work with the plain text, which facilitates manipulation and analysis.
• ✅ Data Cleaning: HTML elements have the potential to add extraneous characters and noise to your data. Removing HTML elements from the text will make the data cleaner, more understandable, and ready for additional processing or analysis.
• ✅ Consistent Data Format: Eliminating HTML tags aids in preserving a standardized data format. Making sure the material is in a standard text format while gathering data from various websites or sources makes processing and analysis easier later on.
• ✅ Natural Language Processing (NLP): Clear text free of HTML elements is essential for activities involving natural language processing, such as sentiment analysis, and text categorization. Models trained on raw HTML may function better than models trained on plain text.
• ✅ Improved Search and Indexing: Eliminating HTML tags will guarantee that your search queries and indexing algorithms operate with clear and pertinent textual information if you are developing a search engine or indexing system.
• ✅ Preventing Code Execution: Erase HTML tags as a security precaution if the HTML content contains scripts or possibly dangerous code. It aids in stopping harmful code that may be included in HTML from running.

Conclusion

Throughout this guide, we have explored the process of eliminating HTML tags from an HTML document by leveraging the beautifulsoup Python package. By following a systematic sequence, we have covered the installation and integration of the beautifulsoup library, the creation of a beautifulsoup instance, and the extraction of HTML tags. Through a practical illustration, we have observed the results of the outlined procedure. This method contributes to improving the legibility and extraction of data.