I scrapped some html via xpath, that I then converted into an etree. Something similar to this:
<td> text1 <a> link </a> text2 </td>
but when I call element.text, I only get text1 (It must be there, when I check my query in FireBug, the text of the elements is highlighted, both the text before and after the embedded anchor elements...
Use element.xpath("string()")
or lxml.etree.tostring(element, method="text")
- see the documentation.
looks like an lxml bug to me, but according to design if you read the documentation. I've solved it like this:
def node_text(node):
if node.text:
result = node.text
else:
result = ''
for child in node:
if child.tail is not None:
result += child.tail
return result
Another thing that seems to be working well to get the text out of an element is "".join(element.itertext())
As a public service to people out there who may be as lazy as I am. Here's some code from above that you can run.
from lxml import etree
def get_text1(node):
result = node.text or ""
for child in node:
if child.tail is not None:
result += child.tail
return result
def get_text2(node):
return ((node.text or '') +
''.join(map(get_text2, node)) +
(node.tail or ''))
def get_text3(node):
return (node.text or "") + "".join(
[etree.tostring(child) for child in node.iterchildren()])
root = etree.fromstring(u"<td> text1 <a> link </a> text2 </td>")
print root.xpath("text()")
print get_text1(root)
print get_text2(root)
print root.xpath("string()")
print etree.tostring(root, method = "text")
print etree.tostring(root, method = "xml")
print get_text3(root)
Output is:
snowy:rpg$ python test.py
[' text1 ', ' text2 ']
text1 text2
text1 link text2
text1 link text2
text1 link text2
<td> text1 <a> link </a> text2 </td>
text1 <a> link </a> text2
<td> text1 <a> link </a> text2 </td>
Here's how it is (ignoring whitespace):
td.text == 'text1'
a.text == 'link'
a.tail == 'text2'
If you don't want a text that is inside child elements then you could collect only their tails:
text = td.text + ''.join([el.tail for el in td])
def get_text_recursive(node):
return (node.text or '') + ''.join(map(get_text_recursive, node)) + (node.tail or '')
If the element
is equal to <td>
. You can do the following.
element.xpath('.//text()')
It will give you a list of all text elements from self
(the meaning of the dot). //
means that it will take all elements and finally text()
is the function to extract text.
element.xpath('normalize-space()') also works.