Get inner text from lxml

Question

lxml.html.fromstring insists on wrapping up everything in a tag (p default). From this tag tree,

<p>this is <b>the</b> good stuff<p>

I want to extract the string:

this is <b>the</b> good stuff

How do I do this?

Answer 1

That's often referred to as "inner xml" rather than "inner text". This is one possible way to get inner xml of an element :

import lxml.etree as etree
import lxml.html

html = "<p>this is <b>the</b> good stuff<p>"
tree = lxml.html.fromstring(html)
node = tree.xpath("//p")[0]

result = node.text + ''.join(etree.tostring(e) for e in node)
print(result)

output :

this is <b>the</b> good stuff