'Equivalent to InnerHTML when using lxml.html to parse HTML

I'm working on a script using lxml.html to parse web pages. I have done a fair bit of BeautifulSoup in my time but am now experimenting with lxml due to its speed.

I would like to know what the most sensible way in the library is to do the equivalent of Javascript's InnerHtml - that is, to retrieve or set the complete contents of a tag.

<body>
<h1>A title</h1>
<p>Some text</p>
</body>

InnerHtml is therefore:

<h1>A title</h1>
<p>Some text</p>

I can do it using hacks (converting to string/regexes etc) but I'm assuming that there is a correct way to do this using the library which I am missing due to unfamiliarity. Thanks for any help.

EDIT: Thanks to pobk for showing me the way on this so quickly and effectively. For anyone trying the same, here is what I ended up with:

from lxml import html
from cStringIO import StringIO
t = html.parse(StringIO(
"""<body>
<h1>A title</h1>
<p>Some text</p>
Untagged text
<p>
Unclosed p tag
</body>"""))
root = t.getroot()
body = root.body
print (element.text or '') + ''.join([html.tostring(child) for child in body.iterdescendants()])

Note that the lxml.html parser will fix up the unclosed tag, so beware if this is a problem.

Solution 1:^[1]

Sorry for bringing this up again, but I've been looking for a solution and yours contains a bug:

<body>This text is ignored
<h1>Title</h1><p>Some text</p></body>

Text directly under the root element is ignored. I ended up doing this:

(body.text or '') +\
''.join([html.tostring(child) for child in body.iterchildren()])

Solution 2:^[2]

import lxml.etree as ET

     body = t.xpath("//body");
     for tag in body:
         h = html.fromstring( ET.tostring(tag[0]) ).xpath("//h1");
         p = html.fromstring(  ET.tostring(tag[1]) ).xpath("//p");             
         htext = h[0].text_content();
         ptext = h[0].text_content();

you can also use .get('href') for a tag and .attrib for attribute ,

here tag no is hardcoded but you can also do this dynamic

Solution 3:^[3]

Here is a Python 3 version:

from xml.sax import saxutils
from lxml import html

def inner_html(tree):
    """ Return inner HTML of lxml element """
    return (saxutils.escape(tree.text) if tree.text else '') + \
        ''.join([html.tostring(child, encoding=str) for child in tree.iterchildren()])

Note that this includes escaping of the initial text as recommended by andreymal -- this is needed to avoid tag injection if you're working with sanitized HTML!

Solution 4:^[4]

I find none of the answers satisfying, some are even in Python 2. So I add a one-liner solution that produces innerHTML-like output and works with Python 3:

from lxml import etree, html

# generate some HTML element node
node = html.fromstring("""<container>
Some random text <b>bold <i>italic</i> yeah</b> no yeah
<!-- comment blah blah -->  <img src='gaga.png' />
</container>""")

# compute inner HTML of element
innerHTML = "".join([str(c) if type(c) == etree._ElementUnicodeResult else html.tostring(c, with_tail=False).decode() for c in node.xpath("node()")]).strip()

The result will be:

'Some random text <b>bold <i>italic</i> yeah</b> no yeah\n<!-- comment blah blah -->  <img src="gaga.png">'

What it does: The xpath delivers all node children (text, elements, comments). The list comprehension produces a list of the text contents of the text nodes and HTML content of element nodes. Those are then joined into a single string. If you want to get rid of comments, use *|text() instead of node() for xpath.

Sources

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Source: Stack Overflow

Solution	Source
Solution 1
Solution 2
Solution 3	Jack Cushman
Solution 4

'Equivalent to InnerHTML when using lxml.html to parse HTML

Solution 1:[1]

Solution 2:[2]

Solution 3:[3]

Solution 4:[4]

Sources

Related Questions

Solution 1:^[1]

Solution 2:^[2]

Solution 3:^[3]

Solution 4:^[4]