• [Python-announce] RELEASE: Beautiful Soup 4.13.0 beta 3

    From Sumana Harihareswara@21:1/5 to All on Wed Jan 8 20:40:04 2025
    If you use the screen-scraping library Beautiful Soup (MIT license),
    please test Beautiful Soup 4.13.0b3, now available on PyPI:

    https://pypi.org/project/beautifulsoup4/4.13.0b3/

    pip install beautifulsoup4==4.13.0b3

    Maintainer Leonard Richardson hopes to get feedback before the final
    release, which he targets for early February.

    Key changes from 4.12.3 (Jan. 2024):

    * dropping support for Python 3.6

    * "a new feature (the ElementFilter class) which makes it easy to swap
    in your own matching logic for Beautiful Soup's default logic when
    calling methods like find()."

    * type hints in the Beautiful Soup code base; Richardson requests
    "feedback from people who use type hints when developing with
    Beautiful Soup... There might be some changes to the type hint
    system it would be good to make before doing a full 4.13.0 release."

    * "a larger-than-usual number of deprecations and changes that may
    break backwards compatibility"

    If you have questions, send them to the discussion group: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/beautifulsoup . If
    you find a bug, file it on Launchpad
    https://bugs.launchpad.net/beautifulsoup/ . If it's a security
    vulnerability, report it confidentially through Tidelift: https://tidelift.com/security .

    Leonard Richardson writes:

    ------

    Hi, everyone,

    I've done a lot of on-and-off work on Beautiful Soup 4.13.0 over the
    past few months, and it's added up to enough that I've decided to do
    another beta release before publishing it to the world. I hope to
    publish the final 4.13.0 release in early February.

    One non-code change is that I've cleaned up the docstrings and added
    API docs, generated from those docstrings, to the Beautiful Soup
    documentation. For the time being you can see the 4.13.0 documentation
    here,

    https://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/bs4/doc/4.13.0/

    and here is the generated API doc portion of that documentation.

    https://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/bs4/doc/4.13.0/api/modules.html

    I've attached the entire 4.13.0 changelog to the bottom of this
    message, but here are the most significant changes *since the previous
    beta* last year:

    * The html5 formatter is much less aggressive about escaping
    ampersands, in a way that generates cleaner HTML but could break
    your project's test suite if you compare Beautiful Soup's output to
    pregenerated HTML snapshots.

    * The ElementFilter API has been changed slightly and is now
    finalized.

    * A number of new generators have been added which yield the element
    itself before beginning to traverse the tree,
    e.g. PageElement.self_and_parents.

    * Methods like Tag.extend and PageElement.insert_after now return the
    elements that were inserted.

    Since this is a prerelease version, you'll have to explicitly ask pip
    to install it, e.g. from the command line:

    `pip install beautifulsoup4==4.13.0b3`

    or by putting something like this in your requirements.txt:

    `beautifulsoup4==4.13.0b3`

    ------

    The full changelog is available in the 4.13.0 beta 3 release
    announcement:

    https://groups.google.com/g/beautifulsoup/c/cX5m7s8v9TM/m/HHXWmwjdBwAJ

    For a summary of the previous beta release (March 2024):

    https://groups.google.com/g/beautifulsoup/c/9w_PEBCaM6c/m/RrIaqGcYAgAJ

    Documentation, guidance for enterprise users, and more at the project
    homepage:

    https://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/


    best,
    Sumana Harihareswara

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