How to remove whitespace in BeautifulSoup

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>'

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.

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 ""