lxml.etree, element.text doesn't return the entire text from an element

Question

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...

Answer 1

Use element.xpath("string()") or lxml.etree.tostring(element, method="text") - see the documentation.

Answer 2

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 

Answer 3

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