Why do I get a recursion error with BeautifulSoup and IDLE?

Question

I am following a tutorial to try to learn how to use BeautifulSoup. I am trying to remove names from the urls on a html page I downloaded. I have it working great to this po

Answer 1

This is a buggy interaction between IDLE and BeautifulSoup's NavigableString objects (which subclass unicode). See issue 1757057; it's been around for a while.

The work-around is to convert the object to a plain unicode value first:

print unicode(names)