How to remove whitespace in BeautifulSoup

I have a bunch of HTML I'm parsing with BeautifulSoup and it's been going pretty well except for one minor snag. I want to save the output into a single-lined string, with the following as my current output:

    <li><span class="plaincharacterwrap break">
                    Zazzafooky but one two three!
                </span></li>
<li><span class="plaincharacterwrap break">
                    Zazzafooky2
                </span></li>
<li><span class="plaincharacterwrap break">
                    Zazzafooky3
                </span></li>

Ideally I'd like

<li><span class="plaincharacterwrap break">Zazzafooky but one two three!</span></li><li><span class="plaincharacterwrap break">Zazzafooky2</span></l开发者_运维百科i>

There's a lot of redundant whitespace that I'd like to get rid of but it's not necessarily removable using strip(), nor can I blatantly remove all the spaces because I need to retain the text. How can I do it? It seems like a common enough problem that regex would be overkill, but is that the only way?

I don't have any <pre> tags so I can be a little more forceful there.

Thanks once again!

Here is how you can do it without regular expressions:

>>> html = """    <li><span class="plaincharacterwrap break">
...                     Zazzafooky but one two three!
...                 </span></li>
... <li><span class="plaincharacterwrap break">
...                     Zazzafooky2
...                 </span></li>
... <li><span class="plaincharacterwrap break">
...                     Zazzafooky3
...                 </span></li>
... """
>>> html = "".join(line.strip() for line in html.split("\n"))
>>> html
'<li><span class="plaincharacterwrap break">Zazzafooky but one two three!</span></li><li><span class="plaincharacterwrap break">Zazzafooky2</span></li><li><span class="plaincharacterwrap break">Zazzafooky3</span></li>'

Old question, I know, but beautifulsoup4 has this helper called stripped_strings.

Try this:

description_el = about.find('p', { "class": "description" })
descriptions = list(description_el.stripped_strings)
description = "\n\n".join(descriptions) if descriptions else ""

re.sub(r'[\ \n]{2,}', '', yourstring)

Regex [\ \n]{2} matches newlines and spaces (has to be escaped) when there's more than two or more of them. The more thorough implementation is this:

re.sub('\ {2,}', '', yourstring)
re.sub('\n*', '', yourstring)

I would think the first would only replace multiple newlines, but it seems (at least for me) to work just fine.

In case you came here after getting troubled by BeautifulSoup prettify(). I think this solution won't add extra spaces.

from lxml import html, etree

doc = html.fromstring(open('inputfile.html').read())
out = open('out.html', 'wb')
out.write(etree.tostring(doc))

Please see this Ian Bicking's answer on stackoverflow

Parsing via xml.etree is simple...

from xml.etree import ElementTree as ET
tree = ET.parse('out.html')
title = tree.find(".//title").text
print(title)