BS4: Getting text in tag

Use .children

soup.find('a').children.next()
s.r.o.,

One option would be to get the first element from the contents of the a element:

>>> from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
>>> data = '<li><a href="example"> s.r.o., <small>small</small></a></li>'
>>> soup = BeautifulSoup(data)
>>> print soup.find('a').contents[0]
 s.r.o., 

Another one would be to find the small tag and get the previous sibling:

>>> print soup.find('small').previous_sibling
 s.r.o., 

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Well, there are all sorts of alternative/crazy options also:

>>> print next(soup.find('a').descendants)
 s.r.o., 
>>> print next(iter(soup.find('a')))
 s.r.o.,