Python string prints as [u'String']
[u'ABC']
would be a one-element list of unicode strings. Beautiful Soup always produces Unicode. So you need to convert the list to a single unicode string, and then convert that to ASCII.
I don't know exaxtly how you got the one-element lists; the contents member would be a list of strings and tags, which is apparently not what you have. Assuming that you really always get a list with a single element, and that your test is really only ASCII you would use this:
soup[0].encode("ascii")
However, please double-check that your data is really ASCII. This is pretty rare. Much more likely it's latin-1 or utf-8.
soup[0].encode("latin-1")
soup[0].encode("utf-8")
Or you ask Beautiful Soup what the original encoding was and get it back in this encoding:
soup[0].encode(soup.originalEncoding)
You probably have a list containing one unicode string. The repr
of this is [u'String']
.
You can convert this to a list of byte strings using any variation of the following:
# Functional style.
print map(lambda x: x.encode('ascii'), my_list)
# List comprehension.
print [x.encode('ascii') for x in my_list]
# Interesting if my_list may be a tuple or a string.
print type(my_list)(x.encode('ascii') for x in my_list)
# What do I care about the brackets anyway?
print ', '.join(repr(x.encode('ascii')) for x in my_list)
# That's actually not a good way of doing it.
print ' '.join(repr(x).lstrip('u')[1:-1] for x in my_list)
import json, ast
r = {u'name': u'A', u'primary_key': 1}
ast.literal_eval(json.dumps(r))
will print
{'name': 'A', 'primary_key': 1}