Pretty print

html.parser repairs unclosed tags. prettify() prints the repaired tree with indentation so you can see what the parser decided.

Repair

html = """
<p>Unclosed paragraph
<ul>
<li>Nairobi
<li>Mombasa
</ul>
"""
soup = BeautifulSoup(html, "html.parser")
print("--- str ---")
print(soup)
print("--- pretty ---")
print(soup.prettify())

The parser closes the <p> and each <li>. Pretty output is for reading, not for byte-stable diffs.

Encode

html = "<p>Kisumu</p>"
soup = BeautifulSoup(html, "html.parser")
print(str(soup))
print(soup.encode("utf-8"))

str(soup) is the compact HTML string. Use that when you write a file.