Get all text from an XML document?

Question

How can I get all the text content of an XML document, as a single string - like this Ruby/hpricot example but using Python.

I'd like to replace XML tags with a single whitespace.

Answer 1

Using stdlib xml.etree

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

tree = ET.parse('sample.xml') 
print(ET.tostring(tree.getroot(), encoding='utf-8', method='text'))

Answer 2

I really like BeautifulSoup, and would rather not use regex on HTML if we can avoid it.

Adapted from: [this StackOverflow Answer], [BeautifulSoup documentation]

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
soup = BeautifulSoup(txt)    # txt is simply the a string with your XML file
pageText = soup.findAll(text=True)
print ' '.join(pageText)

Though of course, you can (and should) use BeautifulSoup to navigate the page for what you are looking for.