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.
Answer
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()])