In [35]: import bs4 as bs
In [36]: bs.BeautifulSoup('<h1>FOO</h1>', "html.parser")
Out[36]: <h1>FOO</h1>
This parses the HTML with Python’s builtin HTML parser.
Quoting the docs:
Unlike html5lib, this parser makes no attempt to create a well-formed
HTML document by adding a<body>
tag. Unlike lxml, it doesn’t even
bother to add an<html>
tag.
Alternatively, you could use the html5lib
parser and just select the element after <body>
:
In [61]: soup = bs.BeautifulSoup('<h1>FOO</h1>', 'html5lib')
In [62]: soup.body.next
Out[62]: <h1>FOO</h1>