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Getting Started with Beautiful Soup

You're reading from   Getting Started with Beautiful Soup Learn how to extract information from websites using Beautiful Soup and the Python urllib2 module. This practical, hands-on guide covers everything you need to know to get a head start in website scraping.

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Product type Paperback
Published in Jan 2014
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781783289554
Length 130 pages
Edition 1st Edition
Languages
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Author (1):
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Vineeth G Nair Vineeth G Nair
Author Profile Icon Vineeth G Nair
Vineeth G Nair
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Toc

Unformatted printing


Beautiful Soup supports the plain printing of the BeautifulSoup and Tag objects. This will return only the plain string without any formatting.

This can be done by using the str() or the unicode() method.

If we use the str() method on the BeautifulSoup or the Tag object, we get a normal Python string, shown as follows:

print(str(soup))

#output
'<html><body><p class="ecopyramid"></p><ul id="producers"><li class="producerlist"><div class="name">plants</div><div class="number">100000</div></li><li class="producerlist"><div class="name">algae</div><div class="number">100000</div></li></ul></body></html>'

We can use the encode() method that we used in Chapter 6, Encoding Support in Beautiful Soup, to encode the output in a specific encoding format.

We can use the decode() function on the BeautifulSoup or Tag object to get the Unicode string.

print(soup.decode...
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