I want to preserve <br>
tags as \n
when extracting the text content from lxml elements.
Example code:
fragment = '<div>This is a text node.<br/>This is another text node.<br/><br/><span>And a child element.</span><span>Another child,<br> with two text nodes</span></div>'
h = lxml.html.fromstring(fragment)
Output:
> h.text_content()
'This is a text node.This is another text node.And a child element.Another child, with two text nodes'
Prepending an \n
character to the tail of each <br />
element should give the result you're expecting:
>>> import lxml.html as html
>>> fragment = '<div>This is a text node.<br/>This is another text node.<br/><br/><span>And a child element.</span><span>Another child,<br> with two text nodes</span></div>'
>>> doc = html.document_fromstring(fragment)
>>> for br in doc.xpath("*//br"):
br.tail = "\n" + br.tail if br.tail else "\n"
>>> doc.text_content()
'This is a text node.\nThis is another text node.\n\nAnd a child element.Another child,\n with two text nodes'
>>> fragment
'<div>This is a text node.<br/>This is another text node.<br/><br/><span>And a child element.</span><span>Another child,<br> with two text nodes</span></div>'