BeautifulSoup uses regular expressions! http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags/1732454#1732454 http:/

BeautifulSoup uses regular expressions! http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags/1732454#1732454 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-... Like many here point out, lxml is a fast and versatile library that could be used for this alone without BS. lxml.html can parse HTML and lxml also has support for using HTML5 parser from html5lib that deals with broken HTML in the standardized way.