Cool, I’ve added it to my watch-list.

Sure – it’s already hosted open source at http://github.com/brycethomas/BeautifulSoupedUp. I haven’t had the time available to do much more with it myself, though I’d love to see someone port this over to a browser extension that integrated in nicely with the “view HTML source” feature.

IMHO, this app has potential reaching far beyond the personal blogosphere.

I can’t wait to dig into the source to see how you did the highlighting part. Nice work.

In terms of taking a website (e.g. one of the travel pages), scraping its content and converting it into a useful format (e.g. something suitable for the Kindle), Beautiful Souped Up really isn’t the tool for the job. The Beautiful Souped Up utility I’ve written here really is aimed at programmers who are already familiar with the Python programming language and the Beautiful Soup software library.

Beautiful Souped Up is just a tool that lets programmers meddle around a little with the page to figure out what code they’d need to write to extract the pieces of the page they’re after. It doesn’t do the other work required in a real screen scraper such as retrieving the page in the first place and converting the extracted pieces of text into an appropriate format. For this reason, Beautiful Souped Up really isn’t a complete screen scraping solution. It just helps a little in the meddling stage. The rest of the work requires a lot more Python code.

Theoretically, using Beautiful Soup you could take whatever pieces of the webpage’s HTML you’re after and convert it whatever format you want, whether that be some format that lets you read it on the Kindle or some other format altogether. Actually programming it to do such a thing however would be a fairly involved process, especially when the output has to be converted to comply with a specific format such as something suitable for the Kindle. So unfortunately I can’t be of much help given you’re circumstances.

I am not a programmer but this code looks like it would make what i want pretty easy. I am looking for a easy tool to scrape websites and convert them to something my Kindle can read.

In particular I want to be able to scape VirtualTourist.Com on a particular city or country.

For example I am going to Hamburg in two weeks. The page for info is:

http://www.virtualtourist.com/travel/Europe/Germany/Freie_und_Hansestadt_Hamburg/Hamburg-56480/TravelGuide-Hamburg.html

What would this look like after scaping in Beautiful Soup?