it's a different tool. Mechanize concentrates on navigating pages and downloading pages, following links, handling cookies etc. BeautifulSoup and lxml parse inf

it's a different tool. Mechanize concentrates on navigating pages and downloading pages, following links, handling cookies etc. BeautifulSoup and lxml parse information out of the html. There's some overlap, but not much. I have tended to use BeautifulSoup and mechanize together. As mentioned above, BeautifulSoup is no longer being actively maintained, and I'd recommend starting with lxml in most cases. I'm still using BeautifulSoup mainly because I have most of the package memorized.