Python beautifulsoup trying to remove html tags 'span'

Question

I am trying to remove

[<span class="street-address">
            510 E Airline Way
           </span>]

and I have used this clean function to remove the one that is in between < >

def clean(val):
 if type(val) is not StringType: val = str(val)
 val = re.sub(r'<.*?>', '',val) 
 val = re.sub("\s+" , " ", val)
 return val.strip()

and it produces [ 510 E Airline Way ]

i am trying to add within "clean" function to remove the char '[' and ']' and basically i just want to get the "510 E Airline Way".

anyone has any clue what can i add to clean function?

thank you

Answer 1

Using re:

>>> import re
>>> s='[<span class="street-address">\n            510 E Airline Way\n           </span>]'
>>> re.sub(r'\[|\]|\s*<[^>]*>\s*', '', s)
'510 E Airline Way'

Using BeautifulSoup:

>>> from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
>>> s='[<span class="street-address">\n            510 E Airline Way\n           </span>]'
>>> b = BeautifulSoup(s)
>>> b.find('span').getText()
u'510 E Airline Way'

Using lxml:

>>> from lxml import html
>>> s='[<span class="street-address">\n            510 E Airline Way\n           </span>]'
>>> h = html.document_fromstring(s)
>>> h.cssselect('span')[0].text.strip()
'510 E Airline Way'