How do I get the whole content between two xml tags in Python?

Question

I try to get the whole content between an opening xml tag and it\'s closing counterpart.

Getting the content in straight cases like title below is easy

Answer 1

from lxml import etree
t = etree.XML(
"""

  
  Some text with data in it.
"""
)
(t.text + ''.join(map(etree.tostring, t))).strip()

The trick here is that t is iterable, and when iterated, yields all child nodes. Because etree avoids text nodes, you also need to recover the text before the first child tag, with t.text.

In [50]: (t.text + ''.join(map(etree.tostring, t))).strip()
Out[50]: '\n  Some text with data in it.'

Or:

In [6]: e = t.xpath('//text')[0]

In [7]: (e.text + ''.join(map(etree.tostring, e))).strip()
Out[7]: 'Some text with data in it.'