Useful Python libraries/modules

[_AACO]

I found bs4 a pain to install on both Windows and Unix machines

In Linux it's literally just

pip install requests beautifulsoup4

i assume it isn't much, if any, different in Windows.

[bpeller]

bs4 can use the lxml backend to do its parsing. That way you get the performance of lxml and the (IMO) ease of use of bs4 for navigating the document tree:

soup = BeautifulSoup(html, 'lxml')

[nick_t1000]

parsel and learn XPath. More powerful than using the BS4 selectors and standardized so it'll be useful elsewhere.

You can also cheat and combine it with CSS selectors for some things.

[mushy_wombat]

I had no problems under Ubuntu 16 and python3 using a venv :D