I have a long html file, and it has a bunch of "span" elements throughout. (Ie they begin with `<span` and end with `/span>`. Is there a way with BeautifulSoup to eliminate all of those span attributes and end up with the remaining html?

My alternative would be to use a series of complex string operations to scrub the text before sending it through BeautifulSoup but I would love to avoid that if possible.

EDIT:
I attempted the decompose() function like this:

```
soup = BeautifulSoup(myhtml)
soup.span.decompose()
print soup.prettify()

```

and all the parts are still in there. It doesn't seem to have altered the html at all.