Equivalent to InnerHTML when using lxml.html to parse HTML

Here is a Python 3 version:

from xml.sax import saxutils
from lxml import html

def inner_html(tree):
    """ Return inner HTML of lxml element """
    return (saxutils.escape(tree.text) if tree.text else '') + \
        ''.join([html.tostring(child, encoding=str) for child in tree.iterchildren()])

Note that this includes escaping of the initial text as recommended by andreymal -- this is needed to avoid tag injection if you're working with sanitized HTML!


Sorry for bringing this up again, but I've been looking for a solution and yours contains a bug:

<body>This text is ignored
<h1>Title</h1><p>Some text</p></body>

Text directly under the root element is ignored. I ended up doing this:

(body.text or '') +\
''.join([html.tostring(child) for child in body.iterchildren()])


import lxml.etree as ET

     body = t.xpath("//body");
     for tag in body:
         h = html.fromstring( ET.tostring(tag[0]) ).xpath("//h1");
         p = html.fromstring(  ET.tostring(tag[1]) ).xpath("//p");             
         htext = h[0].text_content();
         ptext = h[0].text_content();

you can also use .get('href') for a tag and .attrib for attribute ,

here tag no is hardcoded but you can also do this dynamic


You can get the children of an ElementTree node using the getchildren() or iterdescendants() methods of the root node:

>>> from lxml import etree
>>> from cStringIO import StringIO
>>> t = etree.parse(StringIO("""<body>
... <h1>A title</h1>
... <p>Some text</p>
... </body>"""))
>>> root = t.getroot()
>>> for child in root.iterdescendants(),:
...  print etree.tostring(child)
...
<h1>A title</h1>

<p>Some text</p>

This can be shorthanded as follows:

print ''.join([etree.tostring(child) for child in root.iterdescendants()])

Tags:

Python

Parsing

Lxml

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