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)

If accessing/printing single element lists (e.g., sequentially or filtered):

my_list = [u'String'] # sample element
my_list = [str(my_list[0])]

pass the output to str() function and it will remove the unicode output u''. also by printing the output it will remove the u'' tags from it.