lxml.etree insert elements into element.text

Question

I have strings that have empty xml elements in them, like this:

>>> s = \"\"\"fizz buzz  bananas\"\"\"

These strin

Answer 1

You could make your input string a well-formed XML document (with text as the root element) and parse that into an Element object using fromstring(). Then append it to the parent.

from lxml import etree as et

s1 = """foo bar <pb n="42"/> parrots like <pb n="43"/> eggs and spam"""
s2 = "<text>{0}</text>".format(s1)

text = et.fromstring(s2)
root = et.Element('root')
root.append(text)

et.dump(root)

Output:

<root>
 <text>foo bar <pb n="42"/> parrots like <pb n="43"/> eggs and spam</text>
</root>