BeautifulSoup : why does "string" not give me the string?

[Gabriel Rossetti]

Gabriel Rossetti wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> I am using BeautifulSoup to parse some HTML and I came across something
> strange.
> Here is an illustration:
>
>>>> soup = BeautifulSoup(u'<div class="text">hello ça boume<br /></div')
>>>> soup
> <div class="text">hello ça boume<br /></div>
>>>> soup.find("div", "text")
> <div class="text">hello ça boume<br /></div>
>>>> soup.find("div", "text").string
>>>> soup.find("div", "text").next
> u'hello \xe7a boume'
>
> why does soup.find("div", "text").string not give me the string? Is it
> because there is a <br/>? Is there a way to have it ignore the <br/>
> tag? Am I doing something wrong?
>
> Thank you,
> Gabriel
>
> PS
> Sorry if this appears twice on the list, but I sent it 4 hours ago and 
> it never showed up so I resent it.
>
Ok, it was my mail reader, I had one instance open on one PC and another 
on another PC and the IMAP was out of sync or something, the msg wqas 
only present on the other PC, sorry for the spam...