lxml.etree, element.text doesn't return the entire text from an element

Question

I scrapped some html via xpath, that I then converted into an etree. Something similar to this:

 text1  link  text2 
<         


        

Answer 1

As a public service to people out there who may be as lazy as I am. Here's some code from above that you can run.

from lxml import etree

def get_text1(node):
    result = node.text or ""
    for child in node:
        if child.tail is not None:
            result += child.tail
    return result

def get_text2(node):
    return ((node.text or '') +
            ''.join(map(get_text2, node)) +
            (node.tail or ''))

def get_text3(node):
    return (node.text or "") + "".join(
        [etree.tostring(child) for child in node.iterchildren()])


root = etree.fromstring(u" text1  link  text2 ")

print root.xpath("text()")
print get_text1(root)
print get_text2(root)
print root.xpath("string()")
print etree.tostring(root, method = "text")
print etree.tostring(root, method = "xml")
print get_text3(root)

Output is:

snowy:rpg$ python test.py 
[' text1 ', ' text2 ']
 text1  text2 
 text1  link  text2 
 text1  link  text2 
 text1  link  text2 
 text1  link  text2 
 text1  link  text2