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...