BeautifulSoup: get contents[] as a single string

Question

Anyone know an elegant way to get the entire contents of a soup object as a single string?

At the moment I'm getting contents, which is of course a list, and then iterating over it:

notices = soup.find("div", {"class" : "middlecontent"}) con = "" for content in notices.contents:     con += str(content) print con 

Thanks!

Answer 1

What about contents = str(notices) ?

Or maybe contents = notices.renderContents(), which will hide the div tag.

Answer 2

You can use the join() method:

notices = soup.find("div", {"class": "middlecontent"}) contents = "".join([str(item) for item in notices.contents]) 

Or, using a generator expression:

contents = "".join(str(item) for item in notices.contents)