Q:

Handling Indian Languages in BeautifulSoup

I'm trying to scrape the NDTV website for news titles. This is the page I'm using as a HTML source. I'm using BeautifulSoup (bs4) to handle the HTML code, and I've got everything working, except my code breaks when I encounter the hindi titles in the page I linked to. 
My code so far is :
import urllib2
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

htmlUrl = "http://archives.ndtv.com/articles/2012-01.html"
FileName = "NDTV_2012_01.txt"

fptr = open(FileName, "w")
fptr.seek(0)

page = urllib2.urlopen(htmlUrl)
soup = BeautifulSoup(page, from_encoding="UTF-8")

li = soup.findAll( 'li')
for link_tag in li:
   hypref = link_tag.find('a').contents[0]
   strhyp = str(hypref)
   fptr.write(strhyp)
   fptr.write("\n")

The error I get is :
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./ScrapeTemplate.py", line 30, in <module>
  strhyp = str(hypref)
  UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 0-5: ordinal not in range(128)

I got the same error even when I didn't include the from_encoding parameter. I initially used it as fromEncoding, but python warned me that it was deprecated usage.
How do I fix this? From what I've read I need to either avoid the hindi titles or explicitly encode it into non-ascii text, but I don't know how to do that. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

A:

What you see is a NavigableString instance (which is derived from the Python unicode type):
(Pdb) hypref.encode('utf-8')
'NDTV'
(Pdb) hypref.__class__
<class 'bs4.element.NavigableString'>
(Pdb) hypref.__class__.__bases__
(<type 'unicode'>, <class 'bs4.element.PageElement'>)

You need to convert to utf-8 using
hypref.encode('utf-8')

