How do I keep whitespace in BeautifulSoup.contents

Question

Most examples I find online show how to remove whitespace - but in my case I need to keep it.. I have

html = \"I can flip this whole thing with one hand\\n          


        

Answer 1

The html parser seems to only keeps whitespace if the content you are parsing is in a <pre> tag -- in my case, the pre tag was removed. Adding

html = "<pre>" + html + "</pre>"

preserved the whitespace.