How to add space around removed tags in BeautifulSoup

One option would be to find all text nodes and join them with a space:

" ".join(item.strip() for item in poems.find_all(text=True))

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Additionally, you are using beautifulsoup3 package which is outdated and not maintained. Upgrade to beautifulsoup4:

pip install beautifulsoup4

and replace:

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup

with:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

get_text() in beautifoulsoup4 has an optional input called separator. You can use it as follows :

soup = BeautifulSoup(html)
text = soup.get_text(separator=' ')