'BeautifulSoup: Can't convert NavigableString to string

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.

Using BeautifulSoup4 and Python 3.5.1. Should I just bite the bullet and go to an earlier version of Python and BeautifulSoup? Or is there a way I can code my own function to cast a NavigableString to a regular unicode string?

for tag in soup.find_all("span"):
    for child in tag.children:
        if "name" in tag.string: #triggers error, can't compare string to NavigableString/bytes
            return child

    #things i've tried:
    #if "name" in str(tag.string)
    #if "name" in unicode(tag.string) #not in 3.5?
    #if "name" in strring(tag.string, "utf-8")
    #tried regex, didn't work. Again, doesn't like NavigableSTring type. 
    #... bunch of other stuff too!

python-3.x beautifulsoup

Solution 1:^[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..

Solution 2:^[2]

You can do this:

unicode(tag.string)

Solution 3:^[3]

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)

Sources

This article follows the attribution requirements of Stack Overflow and is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Source: Stack Overflow

Solution	Source
Solution 1
Solution 2	Stephen Rauch
Solution 3	marco

'BeautifulSoup: Can't convert NavigableString to string

Solution 1:[1]

For Python 3...

Solution 2:[2]

Solution 3:[3]

Sources

Related Questions

Solution 1:^[1]

Solution 2:^[2]

Solution 3:^[3]