I concur, but technically Scrapy is an entire web scraping/crawling framework for writing crawlers, not just XML/HTML parsing like BeautifulSoup or lxml. You don't even have to use Scrapy's built in processor, you can use BeautifulSoup (or whatever else) if you want. What Scrapy gets you is all the logic for crawling of the web pages (requesting pages, reacting to html errors, etc.). You basically just tell it what urls to parse, what to parse from the pages, and what to do with the parsed data. It handles all the rest. I used it Scrapy just recently on an online movie site (shameless plug: www.qwink.com).

XPath/CSS path selectors for scraping are definitely the "now" way to do it. I recommend Nokogiri (http://nokogiri.org/) for the Ruby users, it does pretty much the same thing in a nutshell.

What it really comes down it is 2x-3x smaller code, plus much faster to write it since you can just test your CSS selector in your web browser such as with FireBug before sticking it into your code.

Interesting - will have to play with it when I wake up. Any reason in particular you think it is better than lxml? Beautiful Soup is only used with lxml to parse broken HTML into a DOM. Lxml does most of the heavy lfiting

How is BeautifulSoup "outdated"? It's meant for making it easy to scrape non-properly-formatted sites, and works very well at that, as I've found out in practice.

What's the advantage of Scrapy?