Beautiful Soup

Reading <br> tags differs per parser

Bug #1676935 reported by paul weijtens
14
This bug affects 2 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Beautiful Soup
Fix Released
Undecided
Unassigned

Bug Description

Well this is a problem I noticed while parsing web-pages. But it seems that the "unclosed" <br> tag is handled differently using different parsers. - Even though that tag is perfectly valid HTML4 and hence the parser shouldn't differ on those.

The full problem is described here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/43022298/beautifulsoup-br-tag-handling-from-input

But in short:

<html><head><title>s</title></head><body>something <br> <b> another thing</b> <br> even more <br> <b> end</b></body></html>

is read as

<html><head></head><body>something <br> <b> another thing</b> <br> even more <br> <b> end</b></br></br></br></body></html>

using html.parser from the python library. While html5lib gives the output:

<html><head></head><body>something <br/> <b> another thing</b> <br/> even more <br/> <b> end</b></body></html>

Now above "input" is perfectly valid HTML, and hence beautifulsoup -per documentation- shouldn't give different outputs/interpretations for the same valid html.

Notice, while omitted here, I also tried above HTML with a HTML4 (and html5) doctype declaration.

PS: I strongly prefer the html5lib version, and consider the html.parser version to be "wrong"...

See original description
paul weijtens (pulli23)
description: updated
Revision history for this message
Leonard Richardson (leonardr) wrote :

Fixed in revision 446.

Changed in beautifulsoup:
status: New → Fix Committed
paul weijtens (pulli23)
Changed in beautifulsoup:
status: Fix Committed → Fix Released
status: Fix Released → Fix Committed
Leonard Richardson (leonardr)
Changed in beautifulsoup:
status: Fix Committed → Fix Released
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