BeautifulSoup: just get inside of a tag, no matter how many enclosing tags there are

Question

I'm trying to scrape all the inner html from the <p> elements in a web page using BeautifulSoup. There are internal tags, but I don't care, I just want to get the internal text.

For example, for:

<p>Red</p>
<p><i>Blue</i></p>
<p>Yellow</p>
<p>Light <b>green</b></p>

How can I extract:

Red
Blue
Yellow
Light green

Neither .string nor .contents[0] does what I need. Nor does .extract(), because I don't want to have to specify the internal tags in advance - I want to deal with any that may occur.

Is there a 'just get the visible HTML' type of method in BeautifulSoup?

----UPDATE------

On advice, trying:

soup = BeautifulSoup(open("test.html"))
p_tags = soup.findAll('p',text=True)
for i, p_tag in enumerate(p_tags): 
    print str(i) + p_tag

But that doesn't help - it prints out:

0Red
1

2Blue
3

4Yellow
5

6Light 
7green
8

Answer 1

Short answer: soup.findAll(text=True)

This has already been answered, here on StackOverflow and in the BeautifulSoup documentation.

UPDATE:

To clarify, a working piece of code:

>>> txt = """\
... <p>Red</p>
... <p><i>Blue</i></p>
... <p>Yellow</p>
... <p>Light <b>green</b></p>
... """
>>> import BeautifulSoup
>>> BeautifulSoup.__version__
'3.0.7a'
>>> soup = BeautifulSoup.BeautifulSoup(txt)
>>> for node in soup.findAll('p'):
...     print ''.join(node.findAll(text=True))

Red
Blue
Yellow
Light green

Answer 2

The accepted answer is great but it is 6 years old now, so here's the current Beautiful Soup 4 version of this answer:

>>> txt = """\
<p>Red</p>
<p><i>Blue</i></p>
<p>Yellow</p>
<p>Light <b>green</b></p>
"""
>>> from bs4 import BeautifulSoup, __version__
>>> __version__
'4.5.1'
>>> soup = BeautifulSoup(txt, "html.parser")
>>> print("".join(soup.strings))

Red
Blue
Yellow
Light green

Answer 3

I have stumbled upon this very same problem and wanted to share the 2019 version of this solution. Maybe it helps somebody out.

# importing the modules
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
from urllib.request import urlopen

# setting up your BeautifulSoup Object
webpage = urlopen("https://insertyourwebpage.com")
soup = BeautifulSoup( webpage.read(), features="lxml")
p_tags = soup.find_all('p')


for each in p_tags: 
    print (str(each.get_text()))

Notice that we're first printing the array content one by one and THEN call the get_text() method that strips the tags from the text, so that we only print out the text.

Also:

• it is better to use the updated 'find_all()' in bs4 than the older findAll()
• urllib2 was replaced by urllib.request and urllib.error, see here

Now your output should be:

• Red
• Blue
• Yellow
• Light

Hope this helps someone looking for an updated solution.