CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonxmlapielementtree
Pablo Fernandez
Pablo Fernandez

Reputation: 287680

How do I get the full XML or HTML content of an element using ElementTree?

That is, all text and subtags, without the tag of an element itself?

Having

<p>blah <b>bleh</b> blih</p>

I want 

blah <b>bleh</b> blih

element.text returns "blah " and etree.tostring(element) returns:

<p>blah <b>bleh</b> blih</p>

Upvotes: 12

Views: 9288

Answers (7)

mike rodent
mike rodent

Reputation: 15682

These are good answers, which answer the OP's question, particularly if the question is confined to HTML. But documents are inherently messy, and the depth of element nesting is usually impossible to predict.

To simulate DOM's getTextContent() you would have to use a (very) simple recursive mechanism.

To get just the bare text:

def get_deep_text( element ):
    text = element.text or ''
    for subelement in element:
        text += get_deep_text( subelement )
    text += element.tail or ''
    return text
print( get_deep_text( element_of_interest ))

To get all the details about the boundaries between raw text:

class holder: pass # this is just a way of creating a holder object
holder.element_count = 0
def get_deep_text_w_boundaries(element, depth = 0):
    holder.element_count += 1
    element_no = holder.element_count 
    indent = depth * '  '
    text1 = f'{indent}(el {element_no} tag {element.tag}: text |{element.text or ""}| - attribs: {element.attrib})' 
    print(text1)
    for subelement in element:
        get_deep_text_w_boundaries(subelement, depth + 1)
    text2 = f'{indent}(el {element_no} tag {element.tag} - tail: |{element.tail or ""}|)' 
    print(text2)
get_deep_text_w_boundaries(etree_element)

Example output:

(el 1 tag source: text |DEVANT LE | - attribs: {})
  (el 2 tag g: text |TRIBUNAL JUDICIAIRE| - attribs: {'style_no': '3'})
  (el 2 tag g - tail: ||)
(el 1 tag source - tail: | DE VERSAILLES|)

Upvotes: 3

Arup
Arup

Reputation: 1

This answer is slightly modified of Pupeno's reply. Here I added encoding type into "tostring". This issue took many hours of mine. I hope this small correction will help others.

def element_to_string(element):
        s = element.text or ""
        for sub_element in element:
            s += ElementTree.tostring(sub_element, encoding='unicode')
        s += element.tail
        return s

Upvotes: 0

RayLuo
RayLuo

Reputation: 19290

Most of the answers here are based on the XML parser ElementTree, even PEZ's regex-based answer still partially relies on ElementTree.

All those are good and suitable for most use cases but, just for the sake of completeness, it is worth noting that, ElementTree.tostring(...) will give you an equivalent snippet, but not always identical to the original payload. If, for some very rare reason, that you want to extract the content as-is, you have to use a pure regex-based solution. This example is how I use regex-based solution.

Upvotes: 2

Pablo Fernandez
Pablo Fernandez

Reputation: 287680

This is the solution I ended up using:

def element_to_string(element):
    s = element.text or ""
    for sub_element in element:
        s += etree.tostring(sub_element)
    s += element.tail
    return s

Upvotes: 9

S.Lott
S.Lott

Reputation: 391952

ElementTree works perfectly, you have to assemble the answer yourself. Something like this...

"".join( [ "" if t.text is None else t.text ] + [ xml.tostring(e) for e in t.getchildren() ] )

Thanks to JV amd PEZ for pointing out the errors.

Edit.

>>> import xml.etree.ElementTree as xml
>>> s= '<p>blah <b>bleh</b> blih</p>\n'
>>> t=xml.fromstring(s)
>>> "".join( [ t.text ] + [ xml.tostring(e) for e in t.getchildren() ] )
'blah <b>bleh</b> blih'
>>>

Tail not needed.

Upvotes: 11

PEZ
PEZ

Reputation: 17004

I doubt ElementTree is the thing to use for this. But assuming you have strong reasons for using it maybe you could try stripping the root tag from the fragment:

 re.sub(r'(^<%s\b.*?>|</%s\b.*?>$)' % (element.tag, element.tag), '', ElementTree.tostring(element))

Upvotes: 2

Till
Till

Reputation: 22406

No idea if an external library might be an option, but anyway -- assuming there is one <p> with this text on the page, a jQuery-solution would be:

alert($('p').html()); // returns blah <b>bleh</b> blih

Upvotes: -4

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