Extracting text from XML node with minidom

Question

I\'ve looked through several posts but I haven\'t quite found any answers that have solved my problem.

Sample XML =

Answer 1

You should use the ElementTree api instead of minidom for your task (as explained in the other answers here), but if you need to use minidom, here is a solution.

What you are looking for was added to DOM level 3 as the textContent attribute. Minidom only supports level 1.

However you can emulate textContent pretty closely with this function:

def textContent(node):
    if node.nodeType in (node.TEXT_NODE, node.CDATA_SECTION_NODE):
        return node.nodeValue
    else:
        return ''.join(textContent(n) for n in node.childNodes)

Which you can then use like so:

x = minidom.parseString("""
TEXT1TEXT2 TEXT3""")

twn = x.getElementsByTagName('TextWithNodes')[0]

assert textContent(twn) == u'\nTEXT1TEXT2 TEXT3'

Notice how I got the text content of the parent node TextWithNodes. This is because your Node elements are siblings of those text nodes, not parents of them.