cannot get html content of tag with BeautifulSoup

Fri Jun 18 12:01:44 EDT 2010

On Jun 18, 5:41 pm, someone <petshm... at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> does anyone know how to get html contents of an tag with
> BeautifulSoup? In example I'd like to get all html which is in first
> <p> tag, i.e. <span id="foo">This is paragraph</span> <b>one</b>. as
> unicode object
>
> p.contents gives me a list which I cannot join TypeError: sequence
> item 0: expected string, Tag found
>
> Thanks!
>
> from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
> import re
>
> doc = ['<html><head><title>Page title</title></head>',
>        '<body><p id="firstpara" align="center"><span id="foo">This is
> paragraph</span> <b>one</b>.</p>',
>        '<p id="secondpara" align="blah">This is paragraph <b>two</b>.</
> p>',
>        '</body></html>']
> soup = BeautifulSoup(''.join(doc))
> #print soup.prettify()
> r = re.compile(r'<[^<]*?/?>')
> for i, p in enumerate(soup.findAll('p')):
>     #print type(p) #<class 'BeautifulSoup.Tag'>
>     #print type(p.contents) #list
>     content = "".join(p.contents) #fails
>
>     p_without_html = r.sub(' ', content)
>     print p_without_html

p.renderContents() was what I've looked for