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 sin

Answer 1

EDIT: This is an answer posted when I thought one-space indentation is normal, and as the comments mention it's not a good answer. Check out the others for some better solutions. This is left here solely for archival reasons, do not follow it!

You asked for lxml:

reslist = list(root.iter())
result = ' '.join([element.text for element in reslist]) 

Or:

result = ''
for element in root.iter():
    result += element.text + ' '
result = result[:-1] # Remove trailing space