Exclude unwanted tag on Beautifulsoup Python

You can use extract() to remove unwanted tag before you get text.

But it keeps all '\n' and spaces so you will need some work to remove them.

data=""'<span>
  I Like
  <span class="unwanted"> to punch </span>
   your face
 <span>'''

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup as BS

soup = BS(data, 'html.parser')

external_span = soup.find('span')

print("1 HTML:", external_span)
print("1 TEXT:", external_span.text.strip())

unwanted = external_span.find('span')
unwanted.extract()

print("2 HTML:", external_span)
print("2 TEXT:", external_span.text.strip())

Result

1 HTML: <span>
  I Like
  <span class="unwanted"> to punch </span>
   your face
 <span></span></span>
1 TEXT: I Like
   to punch 
   your face
2 HTML: <span>
  I Like

   your face
 <span></span></span>
2 TEXT: I Like

   your face

---

You can skip every Tag object inside external span and keep only NavigableString objects (it is plain text in HTML).

data=""'<span>
  I Like
  <span class="unwanted"> to punch </span>
   your face
 <span>'''

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup as BS
import bs4

soup = BS(data, 'html.parser')

external_span = soup.find('span')

text = []
for x in external_span:
    if isinstance(x, bs4.element.NavigableString):
        text.append(x.strip())
print(" ".join(text))

Result

I Like your face