title: Cleaning text with beautiful soup
body: <p>Okay so I'm working on processing an html file using beautiful soup and I have done the following:</p>
  
  <pre><code>url = "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/"+'Category:American_football'
  raw = urlopen(url).read()
  soup=BeautifulSoup(raw)
  pages = soup.find("div" , { "id" : "mw-subcategories" })
  cleaned = pages.get_text()
  cleaned = cleaned.encode('utf-8')
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>and my output looks like the following:</p>
  
  <pre><code>"\nSubcategories\nThis category has the following 26 subcategories, out of 26 total.\n\xc2\xa0\n\xe2\x96\xba  American football by city\xe2\x80\x8e (5 C)\n\n\n\xe2\x96\xba  American football by continent\xe2\x80\x8e (6 C)\n\n\n\xe2\x96\xba  American football by country\xe2\x80\x8e (41 C, 1 P)\n\n*\n\xe2\x96\xba  American football-related lists\xe2\x80\x8e (6 C, 16 P)\n\nA\n\xe2\x96\xba  American football occupations\xe2\x80\x8e (2 C, 6 P)\n\nC\n\xe2\x96\xba  American football competitions\xe2\x80\x8e (15 C, 13 P)\n\nE\n\xe2\x96\xba  American football equipment\xe2\x80\x8e (16 P)\n\nH\n\xe2\x96\xba  History of American football\xe2\x80\x8e (8 C, 14 P)\n\nI\n\xe2\x96\xba  American football incidents\xe2\x80\x8e (1 C, 45 P)\n\nM\n\xe2\x96\xba  American football media\xe2\x80\x8e (12 C, 16 P)\n\nO\n\xe2\x96\xba  American football organisations\xe2\x80\x8e (1 C, 7 P)\n\nP\n\xe2\x96\xba  American football people\xe2\x80\x8e (11 C)\n\n\n\xe2\x96\xba  American football plays\xe2\x80\x8e (68 P)\n\n\n\xe2\x96\xba  American football positions\xe2\x80\x8e (1 C, 41 P)\n\nR\n\xe2\x96\xba  American football records and statistics\xe2\x80\x8e (4 C, 8 P)\n\nS\n\xe2\x96\xba  Seasons in American football\xe2\x80\x8e (14 C)\n\n\n\xe2\x96\xba  Semi-professional American football\xe2\x80\x8e (1 C, 9 P)\n\n\n\xe2\x96\xba  American football strategy\xe2\x80\x8e (1 C, 29 P)\n\nT\n\xe2\x96\xba  American football teams\xe2\x80\x8e (10 C, 10 P)\n\n\n\xe2\x96\xba  American football terminology\xe2\x80\x8e (4 C, 127 P)\n\n\n\xe2\x96\xba  American football trophies and awards\xe2\x80\x8e (9 C, 26 P)\n\nV\n\xe2\x96\xba  Variations of American football\xe2\x80\x8e (5 C, 12 P)\n\n\n\xe2\x96\xba  American football venues\xe2\x80\x8e (2 C, 2 P)\n\nW\n\xe2\x96\xba  Women's American football\xe2\x80\x8e (3 C, 3 P)\n\n\xce\x99\n\xe2\x96\xba  American football logos\xe2\x80\x8e (3 C, 211 F)\n\n\xce\xa3\n\xe2\x96\xba  American football stubs\xe2\x80\x8e (6 C, 218 P)\n\n\n"
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I'm trying to figure out how strip out everything but the acutual text names: i.e.</p>
  
  <pre><code>\xe2\x80\x8e (6 C, 218 P)\n\n\n
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Is there a trick to get rid of this using the beautiful soup library or how should I go about further refining the text?</p>