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

Another thing that seems to be working well to get the text out of an element is "".join(element.itertext())

Answer 2

<td> text1 <a> link </a> text2 </td>

Here's how it is (ignoring whitespace):

td.text == 'text1'
a.text == 'link'
a.tail == 'text2'

If you don't want a text that is inside child elements then you could collect only their tails:

text = td.text + ''.join([el.tail for el in td])