How to get BeautifulSoup 4 to respect a self-closing tag?

Question

This question is specific to BeautifulSoup4, which makes it different from the previous questions:

Why is BeautifulSoup modifying my self-closing elements?

s

Answer 1

To parse XML you pass in “xml” as the second argument to the BeautifulSoup constructor.

soup = bs4.BeautifulSoup(S, 'xml')

You’ll need to have lxml installed.

You don't need to pass selfClosingTags anymore:

In [1]: import bs4
In [2]: S = '''<foo> <bar a="3"/> </foo>'''
In [3]: soup = bs4.BeautifulSoup(S, 'xml')
In [4]: print soup.prettify()
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<foo>
 <bar a="3"/>
</foo>