BeautifulSoup - how should I obtain the body contents
Do you mean getting everything inbetween the body tags?
In this case you can use :
import urllib2
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
page = urllib2.urlopen('some_site').read()
soup = BeautifulSoup(page)
body = soup.find('body')
the_contents_of_body_without_body_tags = body.findChildren(recursive=False)
I've found the easiest way to get just the contents of the body is to unwrap() your contents from inside the body tags.
>>> html = "<p>Hello World</p>"
>>> soup = BeautifulSoup(html, "html5lib")
>>> print(soup)
<html><head></head><body><p>Hello World</p></body></html>
>>>
>>> soup.html.unwrap()
<html></html>
>>>
>>> print(soup)
<head></head><body><p>Hello World</p></body>
>>>
>>> soup.head.unwrap()
<head></head>
>>>
>>> print(soup)
<body><p>Hello World</p></body>
>>>
>>> soup.body.unwrap()
<body></body>
>>>
>>> print(soup)
<p>Hello World</p>
To be more efficient and reusable you could put those undesirable elements in a list and loop through them...
>>> def get_body_contents(html):
... soup = BeautifulSoup(html, "html5lib")
... for attr in ['head','html','body']:
... if hasattr(soup, attr):
... getattr(soup, attr).unwrap()
... return soup
>>>
>>> html = "<p>Hello World</p>"
>>> print(get_body_contents(html))
<p>Hello World</p>