NavigableString class – Python Beautifulsoup

Last Updated : 25 Oct, 2020

NavigableString class is provided by Beautiful Soup which is a web scraping framework for Python. Web scraping is the process of extracting data from the website using automated tools to make the process faster. A string corresponds to a bit of text within a tag. Beautiful Soup uses the NavigableString class to contain these bits of text.

Syntax:

<tag> String here </tag>

Below given examples explain the concept of NavigableString class in Beautiful Soup.
Example 1: In this example, we are going to see the type of a string.

Python3

# Import Beautiful Soup 
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup 
  
# Initialize the object with a HTML page 
soup = BeautifulSoup(''' 
    <html> 
        <h2> Heading 1 </h2> 
        <h1> Heading 2 </h1> 
    </html> 
    ''', "lxml") 
  
# Get the whole h2 tag 
tag = soup.h2 
  
# Get the string inside the tag 
string = tag.string 
  
# Print the type 
print(type(string)) 

Output:

<class 'bs4.element.NavigableString'>

Example 2: In this example we are going to convert the NavigableString to a Unicode string.

Python3

# Import Beautiful Soup 
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup 
  
# Initialize the object with a HTML page 
soup = BeautifulSoup(''' 
    <html> 
        <h2> Heading 1 </h2> 
        <h1> Heading 2 </h1> 
    </html> 
    ''', "lxml") 
  
# Get the whole h2 tag 
tag = soup.h2 
  
# Get the string inside the tag and convert  
# it into string 
string = str(tag.string) 
  
# Print the type 
print(type(string)) 