When parsing html why do I need item.text sometimes and item.text_content() others

Question

Still learning lxml. I discovered that sometimes I cannot get to the text of an item from a tree using item.text. If I use item.text_content() I am good to go. I am not s

Answer 1

You maybe confusing different and incompatible interfaces that lxml implements -- the lxml.etree items have a .text attribute, while (for example) those from lxml.html implement the text_content method (and those from BeautifulSoup, also included in lxml, have a .string attribute... sometimes [[only nodes with a single child which is a string...]]).

Yeah, it is inherently confusing that lxml chooses both to implement its own interfaces and emulate or include other libraries, but it can be convenient...;-).