News You Can Bruise for 2006 May 29

Here's a nice bit of trickery I discovered, based on code sent me by Staffan Malmgren. A common task among the target audience for Beautiful Soup is to strip HTML tags from a document. It turns out this is a one-liner:

''.join([e for e in soup.recursiveChildGenerator() if isinstance(e,unicode)])

Where soup is your soup object. I really like the if conditional in list comprehensions; I don't think Ruby has anything like it. I can think of ways to simulate it but they kill its simplicity, which is what I like about it.