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 point.

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

soup = BeautifulSoup(open("43rd-congress.html"))

final_link = soup.p.a
final_link.decompose()

links = soup.find_all('a')

for link in links:
    print link

but when I enter this next part

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

soup = BeautifulSoup(open("43rd-congress.html"))

final_link = soup.p.a
final_link.decompose()

links = soup.find_all('a')

for link in links:
    names = link.contents[0]
    fullLink = link.get('href')
    print names
    print fullLink

I get this error

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:/Python27/python tutorials/soupexample.py", line 13, in <module>
    print names
  File "C:\Python27\lib\idlelib\PyShell.py", line 1325, in write
    return self.shell.write(s, self.tags)
  File "C:\Python27\lib\idlelib\rpc.py", line 595, in __call__
    value = self.sockio.remotecall(self.oid, self.name, args, kwargs)
  File "C:\Python27\lib\idlelib\rpc.py", line 210, in remotecall
    seq = self.asynccall(oid, methodname, args, kwargs)
  File "C:\Python27\lib\idlelib\rpc.py", line 225, in asynccall
    self.putmessage((seq, request))
  File "C:\Python27\lib\idlelib\rpc.py", line 324, in putmessage
    s = pickle.dumps(message)
  File "C:\Python27\lib\copy_reg.py", line 74, in _reduce_ex
    getstate = self.__getstate__
RuntimeError: maximum recursion depth exceeded

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)