How can I preserve as newlines with lxml.html text_content() or equivalent?

Question

I want to preserve
tags as \\n when extracting the text content from lxml elements.

Example code:

fragment = \'&l

Answer 1

Prepending an \n character to the tail of each
element should give the result you're expecting:

>>> import lxml.html as html
>>> fragment = '
This is a text node.
This is another text node.

And a child element.Another child,
 with two text nodes
'
>>> doc = html.document_fromstring(fragment)
>>> for br in doc.xpath("*//br"):
        br.tail = "\n" + br.tail if br.tail else "\n"

>>> doc.text_content()
'This is a text node.\nThis is another text node.\n\nAnd a child element.Another child,\n with two text nodes'
>>> fragment
'
This is a text node.
This is another text node.

And a child element.Another child,
 with two text nodes
'