How to add spaces between nodes when using string() on a tree in XPath

Question

I have a HTML tree where I use the 'string()' query on the root to get all the text from the nodes.

However, I'd like to add a space between each nodes.

I.e.

string() on '<root><div>abc</div><div>def</div></root>' will become 'abcdef'

string() on '<root><div>abc</div><div>def</div></root>' should become 'abc def '

Answer 1

You can try with itertext() method, that iterates over all text content:

from lxml import etree

root = etree.XML('<root><div>abc</div><div>def</div></root>')
print(' '.join(e for e in root.itertext()))

It yields:

abc def

Answer 2

It's not clear what output you want when the XML is more complex than shown, or when it involves mixed content. In XSLT 1.0 you'll have to do a recursive descent of the tree, involving something like

<xsl:template match="div">
  <xsl:if test="not(position()=1)"> </xsl:if>
  <xsl:value-of select="."/>
</xsl:template>

Answer 3

'<root><div>abc</div><div>def</div></root>' should become 'abc def '

In XSLT 1.0, this would be done as:

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" 
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:output method="text" encoding="UTF-8"/>

<xsl:template match="/root">
    <xsl:for-each select="div">
        <xsl:value-of select="."/>
        <xsl:text> </xsl:text>
    </xsl:for-each>
</xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

---

Or perhaps you meant to retrieve all text nodes, regardless of the document structure. This could be done by:

<xsl:template match="/">
    <xsl:for-each select="//text()">
        <xsl:value-of select="."/>
        <xsl:text> </xsl:text>
    </xsl:for-each>
</xsl:template>