Beautiful Soup - Functions Reference

Beautiful Soup Useful Resources

Beautiful Soup - get_text() Method

Quiz

Method Description

The get_text() method returns only the human-readable text from the entire HTML document or a given tag. All the child strings are concatenated by the given separator which is a null string by default.

Syntax

get_text(separator, strip)

Parameters

separator − The child strings will be concatenated using this parameter. By default it is "".
strip − The strings will be stripped before concatenation.

Return Type

The get_text() method returns a string.

Example - Getting Text from html Content

In the example below, the get_text() method gets text from all the HTML tags.

html = '''
<html>
<body>
   <p> The quick, brown fox jumps over a lazy dog.</p>
   <p> DJs flock by when MTV ax quiz prog.</p>
   <p> Junk MTV quiz graced by fox whelps.</p>
   <p> Bawds jog, flick quartz, vex nymphs.</p>
</body>
</html>
'''
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

soup = BeautifulSoup(html, "html.parser")
text = soup.get_text()
print(text)

Output

The quick, brown fox jumps over a lazy dog.
DJs flock by when MTV ax quiz prog.
Junk MTV quiz graced by fox whelps.
Bawds jog, flick quartz, vex nymphs.

Example - Using Separator with get_text() method

In the following example, we specify the separator argument of get_text() method as '#'.

html = '''
   <p>The quick, brown fox jumps over a lazy dog.</p>
   <p>DJs flock by when MTV ax quiz prog.</p>
   <p>Junk MTV quiz graced by fox whelps.</p>
   <p>Bawds jog, flick quartz, vex nymphs.</p>
'''
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

soup = BeautifulSoup(html, "html.parser")
text = soup.get_text(separator='#')
print(text)

Output

#The quick, brown fox jumps over a lazy dog.#
#DJs flock by when MTV ax quiz prog.#
#Junk MTV quiz graced by fox whelps.#
#Bawds jog, flick quartz, vex nymphs.#

Example - Using strip with get_text() method

Let us check the effect of strip parameter when it is set to True. By default it is False.

html = '''
   <p>The quick, brown fox jumps over a lazy dog.</p>
   <p>DJs flock by when MTV ax quiz prog.</p>
   <p>Junk MTV quiz graced by fox whelps.</p>
   <p>Bawds jog, flick quartz, vex nymphs.</p>
'''
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

soup = BeautifulSoup(html, "html.parser")
text = soup.get_text(strip=True)
print(text)

Output

The quick, brown fox jumps over a lazy dog.DJs flock by when MTV ax quiz prog.Junk MTV quiz graced by fox whelps.Bawds jog, flick quartz, vex nymphs.

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