title: BeautifulSoup returns an empty string?
body: <p>I don't know if this question has been asked before, but I couldn't find anything that could help solve my problem (hopefully I didn't misunderstand anything).  I'm learning Python at the moment, using Python 3.5 with IPython, and I ran into some trouble using BeautifulSoup.  As shown below,</p>
  
  <pre><code>import bs4
  exampleFile = open('example.html')
  exampleFile.read()
  &gt;&gt;&gt; '&lt;html&gt;&lt;head&gt;&lt;title&gt;The Website Title&lt;/title&gt;&lt;/head&gt;\n&lt;body&gt;\n&lt;p&gt;Download my &lt;strong&gt;Python&lt;/strong&gt; book from &lt;a href=“http://inventwithpython.com”&gt;my website&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;\n&lt;p class=“slogan”&gt;Learn Python the easy way!&lt;/p&gt;\n&lt;p&gt;By &lt;span id=“author”&gt;Al Sweigart&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;\n&lt;/body&gt;&lt;/html&gt;'
  exampleSoup = bs4.BeautifulSoup(exampleFile.read(), 'html.parser')
  exampleFile.read()
  &gt;&gt;&gt; ''
  elems = exampleSoup.select('#author')
  print(elems)
  &gt;&gt;&gt; []
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I'm able to open and read example.html, but after I use BeautifulSoup, when I try to read the file again, it returns an empty string.  I'm unable to define elems because of this. </p>
  
  <p>I'm trying to understand why this is happening, but I couldn't figure it out so I decided to post a question.</p>
  
  <p>Thanks in advance!</p>