lxml classic: Get text content except for that of nested tags?

Question

This must be an absolute classic, but I can\'t find the answer here. I\'m parsing the following tag with lxml cssselect:

Answer 1

For your example, I think going with XPath is cleaner and easier than CSS:

>>> xml = '
3 Detroit
'
>>> root = etree.fromstring(xml)
>>> print( root.xpath('/li/a/text()'))
[' Detroit']

>>> xml = '
I FooBar! love 3 Detroit
'
>>> root = etree.fromstring(xml)
>>> print( root.xpath('/li/a/text()'))
['I ', ' love ', ' Detroit']

>>> ' '.join([x.strip() for x in root.xpath('/li/a/text()')])
'I love Detroit'