Remove a tag using BeautifulSoup but keep its contents

user_40149 0
Viewed 62530

Currently I have code that does something like this:

soup = BeautifulSoup(value)

for tag in soup.findAll(True):
    if tag.name not in VALID_TAGS:
        tag.extract()
soup.renderContents()

Except I don't want to throw away the contents inside the invalid tag. How do I get rid of the tag but keep the contents inside when calling soup.renderContents()?

beautifulsoup python
11 Answers

Here is the better solution without any hassles and boilerplate code to filter out the tags keeping the content.Lets say you want to remove any children tags within the parent tag and just want to keep the contents/text then,you can simply do:

for p_tags in div_tags.find_all("p"):
    print(p_tags.get_text())

That's it and you can be free with all the br or i b tags within the parent tags and get the clean text.

user_68786190

Here is a python 3 friendly version of this function: 

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup, NavigableString
invalidTags = ['br','b','font']
def stripTags(html, invalid_tags):
    soup = BeautifulSoup(html, "lxml")
    for tag in soup.findAll(True):
        if tag.name in invalid_tags:
            s = ""
            for c in tag.contents:
                if not isinstance(c, NavigableString):
                    c = stripTags(str(c), invalid_tags)
                s += str(c)
            tag.replaceWith(s)
    return soup
user_75068830
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