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

Using strip_elements has the disadvantage that you cannot make it keep some of the elements while replacing others. It also requires the existence of an ElementTree instance (which may be not the case). And last, you cannot use it to replace XML comments or processing instructions. The following should do your job:

for r in f.xpath('//r'):
    text = 'DELETED' + r.tail 
    parent = r.getparent()
    if parent is not None:
        previous = r.getprevious()
        if previous is not None:
            previous.tail = (previous.tail or '') + text
        else:
            parent.text = (parent.text or '') + text
        parent.remove(r)