Equivalent to InnerHTML when using lxml.html to parse HTML

Question

I\'m working on a script using lxml.html to parse web pages. I have done a fair bit of BeautifulSoup in my time but am now experimenting with lxml due to its speed.

Answer 1

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("""
... 
A title
... 
Some text
... """))
>>> root = t.getroot()
>>> for child in root.iterdescendants(),:
...  print etree.tostring(child)
...
A title

Some text

This can be shorthanded as follows:

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