Class BeautifulSoup
In: lib/rubyful_soup.rb
Parent: BeautifulStoneSoup

This parser knows the following facts about HTML:

  • Some tags have no closing tag and should be interpreted as being closed as soon as they are encountered.
  • The text inside some tags (ie. ‘script’) may contain tags which are not really part of the document and which should be parsed as text, not tags. If you want to parse the text as tags, you can always fetch it and parse it explicitly.
  • Tag nesting rules:

    Most tags can‘t be nested at all. For instance, the occurance of a <p> tag should implicitly close the previous <p> tag.

     <p>Para1<p>Para2
      should be transformed into:
     <p>Para1</p><p>Para2
    

    Some tags can be nested arbitrarily. For instance, the occurance of a <blockquote> tag should not implicitly close the previous <blockquote> tag.

     Alice said: <blockquote>Bob said: <blockquote>Blah
      should NOT be transformed into:
     Alice said: <blockquote>Bob said: </blockquote><blockquote>Blah
    

    Some tags can be nested, but the nesting is reset by the interposition of other tags. For instance, a <tr> tag should implicitly close the previous <tr> tag within the same <table>, but not close a <tr> tag in another table.

     <table><tr>Blah<tr>Blah
      should be transformed into:
     <table><tr>Blah</tr><tr>Blah
      but,
     <tr>Blah<table><tr>Blah
      should NOT be transformed into
     <tr>Blah<table></tr><tr>Blah
    

Differing assumptions about tag nesting rules are a major source of problems with the BeautifulSoup class. If BeautifulSoup is not treating as nestable a tag your page author treats as nestable, try writing a subclass.

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