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bs4.NavigableString() ⚬｜Documentation｜1st｜20260122164837-00-⌔

Beautiful Soup Documentation — Beautiful Soup 4.4.0 documentation#navigablestring

NavigableString

A string corresponds to a bit of text within a tag. Beautiful Soup uses the NavigableString class to contain these bits of text:

tag.string
# u'Extremely bold'
type(tag.string)
# <class 'bs4.element.NavigableString'>

A NavigableString is just like a Python Unicode string, except that it also supports some of the features described in Navigating the tree and Searching the tree. You can convert a NavigableString to a Unicode string with unicode():

unicode_string = unicode(tag.string)
unicode_string
# u'Extremely bold'
type(unicode_string)
# <type 'unicode'>

You can’t edit a string in place, but you can replace one string with another, using replace_with():

tag.string.replace_with("No longer bold")
tag
# <blockquote>No longer bold</blockquote>

NavigableString supports most of the features described in Navigating the tree and Searching the tree, but not all of them. In particular, since a string can’t contain anything (the way a tag may contain a string or another tag), strings don’t support the .contents or .string attributes, or the find() method.

If you want to use a NavigableString outside of Beautiful Soup, you should call unicode() on it to turn it into a normal Python Unicode string. If you don’t, your string will carry around a reference to the entire Beautiful Soup parse tree, even when you’re done using Beautiful Soup. This is a big waste of memory.

Printed 2026-06-28.

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