Beautiful Soup

  1. Bug #1676935
  2. Comment #0

Comment 0 for bug 1676935

Revision history for this message
paul weijtens (pulli23) wrote :

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.