How to render contents of a tag in unicode in BeautifulSoup?

Question

This is a soup from a WordPress post detail page:

content = soup.body.find('div', id=re.compile('post'))
title = content.h2.extract()
item['title'] = unicode(title.string)
item['content'] = u''.join(map(unicode, content.contents))

I want to omit the enclosing div tag when assigning item['content']. Is there any way to render all the child tags of a tag in unicode? Something like:

item['content'] = content.contents.__unicode__()

that will give me a single unicode string instead of a list.

Answer 1

Have you tried:

unicode(content)

It converts content's markup to a single Unicode string.

Edit: If you don't want the enclosing tag, try:

content.renderContents()

Answer 2

Best method I can come up with:

unicode(''.join(content.contents))