Python Scraping, how to get text from this through BeautifulSoup? - python-2.7

Question

well here is my code to scrape text content from a site.... well it is working though i am not getting plane text only.... how to handle that
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import mechanize
def getArticle(url):
br = mechanize.Browser()
htmltext = br.open(url).read()
soup = BeautifulSoup(htmltext)
for tag in soup.findAll('span',{'itemprop':'articleBody'}):
print tag.contents
for example when i scrape a site.
i get this output
"[u"\nIn Soviet Russia, it's the banks that pay customers' bills.\xa0Or, at least, one might.", , u'\n', , u'\r\nAn interesting case has surfaced in Voronezh, Russia, where a man is suing a bank for more than 24 million Russian rubles (about $727,000) in compensation over a handcrafted document that was signed and recognized by the bank.\xa0', , u'\n', , u'\r\nA person who goes by name Dmitry Alexeev (his surname was changed ', by the first Russian outlet to publish this story, u') said that in 2008 he received a letter from ', Tinkoff Credit Systems, u'\xa0in his mailbox. It was a credit card application form with an agreement contract enclosed, much like the applications Americans receive daily from various banks working with ', Visa
how to get plain text only?

Answer 1

Use tag.text instead of tag.contents:
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import mechanize
url = "http://www.minyanville.com/business-news/editors-pick/articles/A-Russian-Bank-Is-Sued-for/8/7/2013/id/51205"
br = mechanize.Browser()
htmltext = br.open(url).read()
soup = BeautifulSoup(htmltext)
for tag in soup.findAll('span',{'itemprop':'articleBody'}):
print tag.text