How can one replace an element with text in lxml?

Question

It\'s easy to completely remove a given element from an XML document with lxml\'s implementation of the ElementTree API, but I can\'t see an easy way of consistently replaci

Answer 1

I think that unutbu's XSLT solution is probably the correct way to achieve your goal.

However, here's a somewhat hacky way to achieve it, by modifying the tails of tags and then using etree.strip_elements.

from lxml import etree

data = '''
Some text before 
 and some text after.

Text before  and after
 Text after a sibling  Text before a sibling

'''

f = etree.fromstring(data)
for r in f.xpath('//r'):
  r.tail = 'DELETED' + r.tail if r.tail else 'DELETED'

etree.strip_elements(f,'r',with_tail=False)

print etree.tostring(f,pretty_print=True)

Gives you:

Some text before DELETED
DELETED and some text after.
DELETED
Text before DELETED and after
 Text after a sibling DELETED Text before a sibling