In lxml, how do I remove a tag but retain all contents?

Question

The problem is this: I have an XML fragment like so:

text1 inner1 text2 inner2 text3         


        

Answer 1

Use Cleaner function of lxml to remove tags from html content. Below is an example to do what you want. For an HTML document, Cleaner is a better general solution to the problem than using strip_elements, because in cases like this you want to strip out more than just the tag; you also want to get rid of things like onclick=function() attributes on other tags.

import lxml
from lxml.html.clean import Cleaner
cleaner = Cleaner()
cleaner.remove_tags = ['p']
remove_tags:

A list of tags to remove. Only the tags will be removed, their content will get pulled up into the parent tag.

Answer 2

Try this: http://lxml.de/api/lxml.etree-module.html#strip_tags

>>> etree.strip_tags(fragment,'a','c')
>>> etree.tostring(fragment)
'<fragment>text1 inner1 text2 <b>inner2</b> text3</fragment>'