Removing Tags from HTML Parsed with BeautifulSoup

Question

I'm new to python and I'm using BeautifulSoup to parse a website and then extract data. I have the following code:

for line in raw_data: #raw_data is the parsed html separated into smaller blocks
    d = {}
    d['name'] = line.find('div', {'class':'torrentname'}).find('a')
    print d['name']

<a href="/ubuntu-9-10-desktop-i386-t3144211.html">
<strong class="red">Ubuntu</strong> 9.10 desktop (i386)</a>

Normally I would be able extract 'Ubuntu 9.10 desktop (i386)' by writing:

d['name'] = line.find('div', {'class':'torrentname'}).find('a').string

but due to the strong html tags it returns None. Is there a way to extract the strong tags and then use .string or is there a better way? I have tried using BeautifulSoup's extract() function but I couldn't get it to work.

Edit: I just realized that my solution does not work if there are two sets of strong tags as the space between the words are left out. What would be a way to fix this problem?

Answer 1

Use the ".text" property:

d['name'] = line.find('div', {'class':'torrentname'}).find('a').text

Or do a join on findAll(text=True):

anchor = line.find('div', {'class':'torrentname'}).find('a')
d['name'] = ''.join(anchor.findAll(text=True))