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

A solution that doesn't require an external library like BeautifulSoup, using the built-in sax parsing framework:

from xml import sax

class MyHandler(sax.handler.ContentHandler):
    def parse(self, filename):
        self.text = []
        sax.parse(filename, self)
        return ''.join(self.text)

    def characters(self, data):
        self.text.append(data)

result = MyHandler().parse("yourfile.xml")

If you need all whitespace intact in the text, also define the ignorableWhitespace method in the handler class in the same way characters is defined.