BeautifulSoup treating '<' '>' html tags in BeautifulSoup

Question

I have a string which is in unicode. In the string, I am replacing the '\r' character with '<\p>' in the string, and passing that to BeautifulSoup for parsing.

If I print after the string after the replacement, I see that the replacement went fine. But when I pass the string to BeautifulSoup it treats it like < and >. Why is that ?

I seems to have to do with encoding, but not sure what.

replacing the string

fileString.encode('utf-8')  
fileString = re.sub('\r', "/<\p>", fileString)  
fileString.encode('utf-8')

htmlTag = BeautifulSoup(fileString, from_encoding='utf-8')

Answer 1

<\p> isn't a closing tag. The slash goes the other way:

fileString = fileString.replace('\r', '</p>')