Exclude unwanted tag on Beautifulsoup Python

Question

  I Like
   to punch 
   your face
 

How to print \"I Like your face\" instea

Answer 1

You can use extract() to remove unwanted tag before you get text.

But it keeps all '\n' and spaces so you will need some work to remove them.

data = '''
  I Like
   to punch 
   your face
 '''

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup as BS

soup = BS(data, 'html.parser')

external_span = soup.find('span')

print("1 HTML:", external_span)
print("1 TEXT:", external_span.text.strip())

unwanted = external_span.find('span')
unwanted.extract()

print("2 HTML:", external_span)
print("2 TEXT:", external_span.text.strip())

Result

1 HTML: 
  I Like
   to punch 
   your face
 
1 TEXT: I Like
   to punch 
   your face
2 HTML: 
  I Like

   your face
 
2 TEXT: I Like

   your face

---

You can skip every Tag object inside external span and keep only NavigableString objects (it is plain text in HTML).

data = '''
  I Like
   to punch 
   your face
 '''

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup as BS
import bs4

soup = BS(data, 'html.parser')

external_span = soup.find('span')

text = []
for x in external_span:
    if isinstance(x, bs4.element.NavigableString):
        text.append(x.strip())
print(" ".join(text))

Result

I Like your face