Only extracting text from this element, not its children

what about .find(text=True)?

>>> BeautifulSoup.BeautifulSOAP('<html>yes<b>no</b></html>').find(text=True)
u'yes'
>>> BeautifulSoup.BeautifulSOAP('<html><b>no</b>yes</html>').find(text=True)
u'no'

EDIT:

I think that I've understood what you want now. Try this:

>>> BeautifulSoup.BeautifulSOAP('<html><b>no</b>yes</html>').html.find(text=True, recursive=False)
u'yes'
>>> BeautifulSoup.BeautifulSOAP('<html>yes<b>no</b></html>').html.find(text=True, recursive=False)
u'yes'

This works for me in bs4:

import bs4
node = bs4.BeautifulSoup('<html><div>A<span>B</span>C</div></html>').find('div')
print "".join([t for t in node.contents if type(t)==bs4.element.NavigableString])

output:

AC

You could use contents

>>> print soup.html.contents[0]
yes

or to get all the texts under html, use findAll(text=True, recursive=False)

>>> soup = BeautifulSoup.BeautifulSOAP('<html>x<b>no</b>yes</html>')
>>> soup.html.findAll(text=True, recursive=False) 
[u'x', u'yes']

above joined to form a single string

>>> ''.join(soup.html.findAll(text=True, recursive=False)) 
u'xyes'