How do I get the whole text of an element using ElementTree?

Question

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>

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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

Answer 3

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))

Answer 4

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