I guess what you're looking for is pyquery:
pyquery: a jquery-like library for python.
An example of what you want may be like:
from pyquery import PyQuery
html = # Your HTML CODE
pq = PyQuery(html)
tag = pq('div#id') # or tag = pq('div.class')
print tag.text()
And it uses the same selectors as Firefox's or Chrome's inspect element. For example:
The inspected element selector is 'div#mw-head.noprint'. So in pyquery, you just need to pass this selector:
pq('div#mw-head.noprint')