Question

I am using python’s beautiful stone soup to extract data from this web page. I am using this code segment to get a <li> object:

    req = urllib2.Request(url)
    req.add_header('User-Agent', 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.0.3) Gecko/200809241\
7 Firefox/3.0.3')

    response=urllib2.urlopen(req)
    link=response.read()
    response.close()

    soup = BeautifulStoneSoup(link, convertEntities=BeautifulStoneSoup.XML_ENTITIES)
    p = soup.find('ul',{"class":"vod_ordering"})

    j = 0
    while j < len(p('li')):
        li= p('li')[j]
        j = j+1

And now I want to break down the <li> object into it’s parts. I don’t have a problem (that I know of) to get the icon, link and title but I can’t get the description which is between </strong> and </img> and does not belong to any tag apart from <li>.

I tried to use contents but I get an error:

Error Contents: sequence item 1: expected string or Unicode, Tag found

When I try to do this:

print ''.join(li.contents)

How can I get that string?

Answer 1

I would try

print ''.join(map(str, li.contents))