Preserving anchor tags in BeautifulSoup

[snippsat]

print("RAW: This is an <a href=\"https://www.thesite.com/\">test</a> string.")

This is just a string and not valid html or xml.
Then can regex be a better tool.

>>> import re
>>> 
>>> s = "RAW: This is an <a href=\"https://www.thesite.com/\">test</a> string."
>>> re.sub(r'<.*>', '', s)
'RAW: This is an  string.'