Changing element value with BeautifulSoup returns empty element.

Question

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulStoneSoup

xml_data = """
<doc>
  <test>test</test>
  <foo:bar>Hello world!</foo:bar>
</doc>
"""

soup = BeautifulStoneSoup(xml_data)
print soup.prettify()
make = soup.find('foo:bar')
print make
# prints <foo:bar>Hello world!</foo:bar>

make.contents = ['Top of the world Ma!']
print make
# prints <foo:bar></foo:bar>

How do I change the content of the element, in this case the element in the variable "make", without loosing the content? If you could point me to other pure python modules wich can modify existing xml-documents, please let me know.

PS! BeautifulSoup is great for screenscraping and parsing of both HTML and XML!

Answer 1

Check out the documentation on replaceWith. This works:

make.contents[0].replaceWith('Top of the world Ma!')