BeautifulSoup: Can't convert NavigableString to string

Question

I\'m starting to learn Python and I\'ve decided to code a simple scraper. One problem I\'m encountering is I cannot convert a NavigableString to a regular string.

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Answer 1

For Python 3, the answer is merely str(tag.string)

Other answers will fail.

unicode() is not a built-in in Python 3.

tag.string.encode('utf-8') will convert the string to a byte string, which you don't want..

Answer 2

I came up to this question and got it solved best by the answer of Mark Ramson from How to remove this \xa0 from a string in python? with

import unidecode
word = unidecode.unidecode(tag.string)

Answer 3

You can do this:

unicode(tag.string)

Answer 4

I tried to decode when I should have encoded:

str(child.encode('utf-8'))