CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonxmllxml
Noor
Noor

Reputation: 20150

lxml get full ext of element

I have the following xml:

<text>test<br/><br/><a href="/nature/19700707">All you need to know about British birds.</a><br/></text>

I am wishing to set the whole content of the tag <text> to 11111

I'm using pythong and lxml and the following are my codes:

import nltk
import lxml.etree as le
current_file = '/Users/noor/Dropbox/apps/APIofLife/src/clear_description/bird.rdf'
f = open(current_file,'r')
doc=le.parse(f)
for elem in doc.xpath("//text"):
        elem.text = "11111"
f.close()
f = open(current_file,'w')
f.write(le.tostring(doc))
f.close()

However, after running the above codes, my results are:

<text>11111<br/><br/><a href="/nature/19700707">All you need to know about British birds.</a><br/></text>

I want to know why the whole content of the tag <text> has not been changed to 11111

Upvotes: 1

Views: 145

Answers (1)

falsetru
falsetru

Reputation: 369134

According to lxml.etree._Element documentation, text property correspond to the text before the first subelement.

You need to delete sub elements:

>>> import lxml.etree as le
>>>
>>> root = le.fromstring('''<text>test<br/><br/>
... <a href="/nature/19700707">All you need to know about British birds.</a>
... <br/></text>''')
>>> for elem in root.xpath("//text"):
...     elem.text = '1111'
...     del elem[:]  # <----------
...
>>> le.tostring(root)
'<text>1111</text>'

Upvotes: 1

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