Python and ElementTree: return "inner XML" excluding parent element

Question

In Python 2.6 using ElementTree, what's a good way to fetch the XML (as a string) inside a particular element, like what you can do in HTML and javascript with innerHTML?

Here's a simplified sample of the XML node I am starting with:

<label attr="foo" attr2="bar">This is some text <a href="foo.htm">and a link</a> in embedded HTML</label>

I'd like to end up with this string:

This is some text <a href="foo.htm">and a link</a> in embedded HTML

I've tried iterating over the parent node and concatenating the tostring() of the children, but that gave me only the subnodes:

# returns only subnodes (e.g. <a href="foo.htm">and a link</a>)
''.join([et.tostring(sub, encoding="utf-8") for sub in node])

I can hack up a solution using regular expressions, but was hoping there'd be something less hacky than this:

re.sub("</\w+?>\s*?$", "", re.sub("^\s*?<\w*?>", "", et.tostring(node, encoding="utf-8")))

Pharmacology

Answer 1

How about:

from xml.etree import ElementTree as ET

xml = '<root>start here<child1>some text<sub1/>here</child1>and<child2>here as well<sub2/><sub3/></child2>end here</root>'
root = ET.fromstring(xml)

def content(tag):
    return tag.text + ''.join(ET.tostring(e) for e in tag)

print content(root)
print content(root.find('child2'))

Resulting in:

start here<child1>some text<sub1 />here</child1>and<child2>here as well<sub2 /><sub3 /></child2>end here
here as well<sub2 /><sub3 />

Petronel

Note that this only works with Python 2; for a Python 3-compatible answer, see @JustAC0der's answer below. – Middy

Answer 2

This is based on the other solutions, but the other solutions did not work in my case (resulted in exceptions) and this one worked:

from xml.etree import Element, ElementTree

def inner_xml(element: Element):
    return (element.text or '') + ''.join(ElementTree.tostring(e, 'unicode') for e in element)

Use it the same way as in Mark Tolonen's answer.

Toein

Answer 3

The following worked for me:

from xml.etree import ElementTree as etree
xml = '<root>start here<child1>some text<sub1/>here</child1>and<child2>here as well<sub2/><sub3/></child2>end here</root>'
dom = etree.XML(xml)

(dom.text or '') + ''.join(map(etree.tostring, dom)) + (dom.tail or '')
# 'start here<child1>some text<sub1 />here</child1>and<child2>here as well<sub2 /><sub3 /></child2>end here'

dom.text or '' is used to get the text at the start of the root element. If there is no text dom.text is None.

Note that the result is not a valid XML - a valid XML should have only one root element.

Have a look at the ElementTree docs about mixed content.

---

Using Python 2.6.5, Ubuntu 10.04

Enwind

hi Emil - your solution works OK if all the text is inside subelements, but breaks in my case where the text is directly inside the parent element. Your note about mixed content clearly applies here, although I'm not sure (yet) how to combine head, tail, and subelements together to emit a coherent string. – Pharmacology

closer... but etree.tostring() doesn't include the tail of each subelement. And I think the final dom.tail is not needed since that's the string after an element and not inside it. – Pharmacology

I don't seem to understand you Justin - start here, and and end here is a text that is right inside the root element?! The snippet above might require some fiddling - you can create some test cases and improve it - see the link for the documentation on how to handle mixed content. – Enwind