X is for XML parsing - Python A to Z

Python A-Z is a blog series about Python. Each day, I share insights, ideas and examples for different parts of Python development that match with the letter of the day. Blaugust is an annual blogging festival in August where the goal is to write a blog post every day of the month. Today I’m doing a bit of piggybacking: XML fits the “X” of the day but I’m also going to talk about HTML parsing because we can use the same tool. I’m also cheating a bit (honestly, I couldn’t come up with a new thing starting with X to write about) because I’ll mostly just point you towards my previous work. I’m doing this to bring new eyes to BeautifulSoup as my old blog posts don’t pop up so often in the feeds. I’m starting with a story time: It’s probably one of the things I’ve written and spoken more about than anything else: parsing these formats with BeautifulSoup. My first ever developer conference talk was in PyCon Finland 2016 where I came with two slides: opening and closing and a demo without a…