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This is my first question here. Usually I can find what I need, but after a week of searching and trying I am at the same place, so I need your help.
I have a book that is in a large XML file that is over 6000 lines long. What I need to do is to take an element <sec> and put it's content in a string. Sometimes that element has only one paragraph, and sometimes it has more, sometimes paragraph has lists, and other things, and I need to capture that all in a string.
Here is an example how book is formated.
<book>
<book-body>
<book-part id="ch01" book-part-type="chapter">
<book-part-meta>
<title-group>
<label><target target-type="page" id="pg1"/>Chapter 1</label>
<title>Some Title</title>
</title-group>
</book-part-meta>
<body>
<sec id="ch01lev1sec1" disp-level="level1">
<title>Introduction</title>
<p>This is a <em>paragraph</em></p>
<p>This is second paragraph
<list list-type="bullet">
<list-item><p>List Item 1</p></list-item>
<list-item><p>List Item 2</p></list-item>
<list-item><p>List Item 3</p></list-item>
</list>
</p>
</sec>
</body>
</book-part>
</book-body>
</book>
And from this example I need everything inside the tag (ideally without a title, but I will figure that out later). I have tried using "xml.etree.ElementTree", and using "minidom" but unsuccessfully.
Here is an example of my code using minidom
from xml.dom import minidom
xmldoc = minidom.parse("xCHES.xml")
book = xmldoc.getElementsByTagName("book")[0]
sec = book.getElementsByTagName("sec")
And when I list a number of elements I get the same number as when I search for "<sec" in xml file, so I guess I got them all.
After this point I am stuck, I can't find the way how to extract everything as a text.
The same thing is with "ElementTree", I can locate all <sec> elements but I can't extract the text, or just extract the small part of it.
So if anyone can help me with this problem, it would be great. It doesn't matter what method, as long as it finishes the job.
EDIT: Desired output would be
<title>Introduction</title>
<p>This is a <em>paragraph</em></p>
<p>This is second paragraph
<list list-type="bullet">
<list-item><p>List Item 1</p></list-item>
<list-item><p>List Item 2</p></list-item>
<list-item><p>List Item 3</p></list-item>
</list>
</p>
But as a sting. This could be in one line, formatting is irrelevant.
Thank you :)
889
asked Sep 25 '26 22:09
Following @stovfl's answer on How to get inner content as string using minidom from xml.dom?
Perhaps this works for you?
def getText(nodelist):
# Iterate all Nodes aggregate TEXT_NODE
rc = []
for node in nodelist:
if node.nodeType == node.TEXT_NODE:
rc.append(node.data)
else:
# Recursive
rc.append(getText(node.childNodes))
return ''.join(rc)
# Iterate <sec..>...</sec> Node List
for node in nodelist:
print(getText(node.childNodes))
The output:
Introduction
This is a paragraph
This is second paragraph
List Item 1
List Item 2
List Item 3
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