system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Why would you scrape a webpage with beautiful soup when Pandas read_html tool is way easier?

I'm learning Python right now, and after getting through a MOOC on the basics, I moved onto another course for Webscraping and I found it challenging and frustrating. The furthest I got was getting the header row for a web table, which was all smooshed into one string. It would have taken some regular expressions to make it usable, so I gave up and went back to a data analysis course. In this course, I've been learning the Pandas package, and it's awesome. All I had to do was take a url and use read_html and it printed a really complete table that was almost ready for analysis. So why was I wasting all that time time trying to use BS to do the same thing Pandas could do in 2 lines of code? What advantages does BS have?
gpt
Probably because pandas only works on tables that specifically use <table> html elements, whereas beautiful soup is more general purpose and more finely controlled to search and extract what you want.